Whatever the cause, the result is the same; the recently dead have risen, en masse, to feed on the living. With each victim they claim, their numbers swell, and no force on Earth can contain them. As society collapses, it's up to the Big Damn Heroes to fight their way to safety or keep shooting until things blow over.

The Zombie Apocalypse has arrived.

While Horror is assumed to be an inherent part of the zombie apocalypse, not all the horror and conflict comes from the zombies themselves. Instead it can come from the reaction of the living humans involved, and how they respond to the state of fear and violent chaos brought about by the zombies. Often, the answer is "not well". The breakdown of society, the fear that your Fire-Forged Friends could be infected and turned against you without warning, are at least as important to a zombie story as the zombies themselves, if not more so.

Common to virtually all Zombie Apocalypse tales is that, regardless of the reason zombies attack living/non-infected people, they never attack other zombies. Whether they'll attack animals other than humans varies, but it's rare for The Virus to affect other species, probably because it's cheaper and easier to film humans in make-up than to work with animals, whether trained, animatronic, or CGI.

Due to the threat that zombies pose (they did just become the apocalypse, after all), protagonists of more serious works are required to become very smart very quickly (but will be ignorant with regard to the word "zombie" itself). Failure is often the only option in these stories; rarely do they have an ending that could be considered "happy" by typical standards, or indeed one where humanity survives as a species. Another main staple is that things will always, always go From Bad to Worse. Either from the character's actions or circumstance which are out of their hands, no matter how improbable it is.

The collapse will also take place very quickly, over a period of weeks or months, instead of years. This prevents society and/or the main characters from adapting, and also makes Convenient Comas somewhat plausible. In the occasion where collapse occurs in a couple of months, a nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier could realistically be expected to weather the entire outbreak start to finish in perfect isolation and safety. This will never be brought up. Characters will also assume that their portable radios have infinite reception and frequency range, and local dead air means a completely global collapse. The audience may not need to speculate about this, if a Spreading Disaster Map Graphic crops up in the opening credits.

The trope Zombie Apocalypse refers to any kind of undead apocalypse the common traits of this trope are that the undead spread rapidly, wipe out humans primarily by eating or biting them, and are usually highly infectious — even if the undead happen to resemble vampires or yet another kind of monster more than zombies.

A Zombie Apocalypse can be considered a sort of Came Back Wrong on a very large scale.

Also known as a "Zombocalypse".

Examples:

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Advertising

If Toshiba doesn't make their laptops drop-resistant, the resulting chain of events will cause a zombie outbreak. A marketing campaign has the CEO imagining various worst-case scenarios if some seemingly minor feature isn't added to their product.

Anime & Manga

This is the main plot of Apocalypse no Toride. The main characters are 4 boys who have so far survived the zombie apocalypse by being in a high security juvenile delinquency prison.

Attack on Titan contains many of the hallmarks of the trope, with the constant threat of humanity being devoured by a mindless horde of humanoid creatures being only one problem. Dot Pixis repeatedly predicts that humanity will be its own worst enemy, with food shortages and limited space creating ever-present dangers of starvation or civil war. His grim prediction comes within days of coming true, as the crisis within Wall Rose leaves the refugees starving and on the verge of violent rebellion. The Titans are essentially enormous zombies, with most mindlessly shambling about in their search for human flesh and only possible to bring down by inflicting major damage to the back of the neck. There's also the fact that Titans are transformed humans, and the only way to kill them is to sever the spinal column. The Beast Titan is a being capable of infecting human victims, leaving the horrifying possibility that anyone could become a Titan without warning. While not strictly undead, Titans lack many of the hallmarks of living beings and make about as much sense as a zombie in terms of how they function.

The story gradually moves away from this though as it becomes apparent that the people in the walls are not the last remnants of humanity and the Titans are more of a finite, organic weapon being used against them by another human faction rather than some infinite supply of creatures acting on their own. The mindless Titans are completely cleared from Paradis Island about a year after the battle of Trost and the story then becomes more about human-warfare than the Titan invasion.

Black Butler has one on a Titanic-sized ship they're "only" artificially reanimated corpses.

In Dorohedoro, Hole gets a Zombie Apocalypse every year, and surviving it is as simple as being inside behind locked doors after midnight. This has been going on long enough that the braver (or stupider) denizens of Hole have turned it into a game, with prizes for killing a certain number of Zombies and everything.

Spoofed in a bonus chapter of Fairy Tail titled "Fairy Tail of the Dead Meeeeeeeeen", where Ichiya creates a "beautifying" perfume that spreads into the city and turns everyone who smells it into shambling Ichiya clones. Several typical zombie traits are replaced with Ichiya's quirks, such as moaning "meeeen" instead of "braaains", and infecting their victims by sniffing them instead of biting them. For bonus points, Wendy nearly calls Romeo "Romero" by mistake. In the end, Natsu manages to turn everyone back to normal with a deodorizing spray.

Franken Fran has a zombie outbreak on an island. But it's a Deconstruction. Why? It's actually a disease, and its victims are unable to talk or do anything about it. Fran does note that they're all going to be killed by the survivors if she doesn't do anything soon, but not only was she bitten and forced to detach her head from her body in order to cure herself without being infected, but the chapter ends before she can actually do anything about that or the other victims.

Fullmetal Alchemist has the Cyclops Army, "lesser homunculi" released by Father. They behave a lot like zombies, but headshots don't kill them. They also eat people, and beg for "mama" and "daddy".

In the 2003 anime version'smovie, the Gate inexplicably turns a group of Thule Society soldiers into zombies. They also have thick suits of armor. The Big Bad has some knowledge of alchemy, and so she's able to control the zombies when she passes through the Gate. This results in armored, machine-gun-wielding zombies with militaristic capabilities. Badassity ensues. About their only real weakness is that they possess the zombie gait.

Hellsing has the Nazis causing a zombie apocalypse in London as a side effect of their powers. But that is the least of the protagonist's problems. It is hinted that the zombies (along with the vast fires) cause much more damage than the main actions of the Nazis.

Highschool of the Dead is about a group of teenagers who're forced to escape their school as it quickly becomes overrun by zombies, during a sudden and unexplained outbreak. But they quickly learn that their school was only the beginning. Yet, despite the grim sounding nature of its narrative, it's often offset by bits of comedy and fanservice.

The justification for the Plan 34 massacre is that the Hate Plague Hinamizawa Syndrome could cause a Russo-style Zombie Apocalypse if it started spreading out of control. The manga-only chapter Onisarashi-hen shows precisely what happens when Plan 34 fails and the disease breaks quarantine: aside from a few isolated cases, life goes on as normal. The person who created Plan 34 deliberately lied about how dangerous the Syndrome was in order to get it approved.

Higurashi Kira's second episode features a fog that zombifies the residents of Hinamizawa by brainwashing them and making them act hostile towards those unaffected by the fog. The fog was created by - you guessed it - Miyo Takano.

The Kaku special is even closer to an actual Zombie Apocalypse than anything else in the series.

I Am a Hero: features a loser otaku trying to stave off angry hordes that are consuming Japan.

Subverted in Kara no Kyoukai, the zombies are around for about a minute before Knife Nut Shiki shows what happens when zombie meets very well aimed knife.

In Magical Girl Apocalypse, the world gets invaded by magical girls who inexplicably start slaughtering everybody in their path. Anybody they kill rises again as a zombie.

In a Naruto Shippuden filler arc, a group of ninja has a special jutsu that makes zombies. It turns out that the zombie apocalypse facing the leaf village is actually a diversion, and the real goal is to revive 4 powerful ninja monks who can use a lightning jutsu to destroy the village in one shot.

During the Fourth Shinobi War, Kabuto uses the Edo Tensei to resurrect and control hundreds of the various nations' most powerful shinobi for use against the Shinobi Alliance.

Parodied in the Thriller Bark arc of One Piece, where pretty much every single zombie convention is shattered. Here, zombies can move pretty quick, they get tired, they have resorted to fighting each other on a couple occasions, and bite from them has no effect; plus, the giant zombie is actually the fastest one of the bunch. However, this does make sense considering these zombie are made by implanting the personality and move set of a living person into a specially modified corpse. Thriller Bark zombies feel no pain, however. They feel fear just fine, but not pain.

School-Live! is set in the aftermath of this. The main characters, the self-named "School Life Club", are a group of schoolgirls living in a barricaded section of their old school. One of the unlikeliest Schoolgirl Series ever, since the series is serialized in Manga Time Kirara (Forward).

Space Dandy's fourth episode is about a zombie outbreak at a hospital where Meow is admitted after he gets bitten by a zombie alien, leading to your typical (yet surprisingly frightening for such a light-hearted comedy series) fight for survival for the main characters. Halfway through the episode, all the main characters get bitten and turned (yes, even the robot QT, because they live in an age where robots can be zombified), and by the end, the infection spreads across the entire universe. In a hilarious twist, this turns out to be the best thing to happen to the universe; as detailed by the Lemony Narrator, there's no more death, war, or discrimination now that every living thing in existence is undead, and the heroes even find a more positive outlook on their undeaths by eating yogurt instead of flesh, thinking of themselves as "fermenting" instead of "rotting", and mooching off their own life insurance.

Sunday Without God has a subtle and not particularly violent one. Fifteen years prior, people lost the ability to truly die, so those who did die became undead. At first, something called the "half-dead fever" sprouted up, rendering people straight into zombies, and a deceased's body and mind will still rot, driving them mad, but eventually humanity adapted and deceased people began to create their own communities to support themselves, such as Ortus, with a population of over one million undead. Of course, with no new life the world is still dying and eventually all of the living will become deceased, but it's not a violent or horrific apocalypse.

UQ Holder! has an arc dealing with one of these, caused by a necromancer.

Spoofed in an episode of Urusei Yatsura. Alien toothaches are contagious, and if the sufferer bites three or four people, the pain will go away. In short order the entire classroom is filled with crazed teenagers with swollen faces and a burning need to bite each other and any non-infected that they can. It's like a very silly Zombie Apocalypse.

Comic Books

The Marvel Universe comic Marvel Zombies, spun off from Ultimate Fantastic Four, fuses this with the Super Hero genre, to transform the superpowered characters into intelligent, Russo-style zombies. Zombiism in this series causes decay and an incredibly powerful craving for non-zombified human flesh. Although the virus can infect anyone, the super-powered zombies still keep their powers, and thus quickly overwhelm and devoured all the defenseless, normal humans. The series starts on a world where they're the only ones left, having already hunted down and eaten every last non-zombie person on the planet.

In addition, Marvel Zombies discusses why they do not turn on each other; zombie flesh is unappetizing, and flesh imbued with the Power Cosmic is more nourishing to the zombie-ized superheroes. Also, the zombies are able to stay sane and focused after they have just eaten, though it is later revealed that the hunger also goes away if they go without eating flesh for a sufficient amount of time, making it more like a drug addiction. Later on, they're attacking the main Marvel universe. Good thing Aaron Stack is a robot with chainsaw hands... A later series also hints that the zombie virus is sentient, with various zombified characters referring to it as "the Hunger Gospel". Amusingly, this was actually itself made fun of in Marvel Zombies 5, in which the characters go to the real world and talk about how the trope itself makes little sense.

The Goon is all about zombies, all are created by an unnamed Zombie Priest to be his army, most are fully sentient and can do pretty much anything (others are standard Romno) also the bulk of them are all former Mobsters.

Amazingly, this even happened to The Smurfs. The Smurfs started out as a Belgian comic book, and in the first issue, "The Black Smurfs", a Smurf is infected by a disease that turns him jet-black, violent, and unable to speak. He then spreads the disease by biting other Smurfs, and Papa Smurf and the few other remaining normal Smurfs have to find a cure. This story, despite having nearly every element of the modern Zombie Apocalypse, predated Night of the Living Dead by nine years. When the story was adapted for the animated series (see below), the color of the "zombie" Smurfs was changed from black to purple, presumably to avoid any accusations of racism. The Papercutz translation of the original comic book story to English also changes the infected Smurfs to purple. Also, purple allows for more shading and greater visibility. Gary explains the events of the first issue, Les Schtroumpfs Noirs, here. The original story also serves as the Origins Episode for the comics version of Grouchy Smurf — he was the Patient Zero who initially spread the infection, and retained some of the anti-social tendencies after the disease was cured. (In the animated version, Grouchy already exists, and Lazy is the first Smurf infected.)

The Walking Dead is an ongoing comic book that follows Rick Grimes, an Atlanta sheriff who Slept Through the Apocalypse, as he tries to find a safe place for his family and a rotating cast of other survivors. Since it is an ongoing series perpetuated by Rule of Drama, any safe haven is a Hope Spot at best, and Rick's life is perpetually a From Bad to Worse scenario. The narrative only follows Rick's story, so it is unknown how bad the apocalypse is, but the zombies have at least overrun the East coast of the United States. The zombies follow typical Romero rules.

The Walking Dead is a unique case of the Zombie Apocalypse setting. Firstly, the zombies are presented as more like a natural disaster than a consistent threat: the true conflict of the series comes from interactions with fellow survivors and other group members. Secondly, bites do not infect people, as the virus is airborne and people turn on death, meaning the likelihood of a widespread outbreak occurring is much greater (although the bites are still deadly). Thirdly, the USA as a nation state collapsed long before the story starts, leaving people as scattered, nomadic scavengers. Finally, walkers seem to have good hearing and smell but poor eyesight. This functions as a double-edged sword: on one hand, walkers are drawn to gunfire and thus survivors must be careful about use of firearms, but on the other hand, it is possible to sneak around zombies provided you stay out of sight and don't attract attention, placing more emphasis on stealth and melee combat. This overall makes the idea of a widespread outbreak more realistic and plausible, while addressing commonly cited issues people have with the setting.

In Dead West, zombies rise up in a town built on ground where a Native American tribe was slaughtered. Then a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo by the Man With No Name shows up and things get interesting.

Zombies vs. Robots (and its sequel Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons) starts out in a post zombie apocalypse world where man's former servants fight to protect the last uninfected baby.

The Black Lantern Corps in the Green Lantern story "Blackest Night" are a particularly nasty variation. The zombies are reanimated by flying rings that are programmed to automatically seek out corpses. As long as the rings are still worn, they can construct zombies out of almost anything, even empty skeletons, so damage to the brain doesn't kill them. They are neither slow nor stupid, regaining all the skills and abilities they had in life, including any superhuman powers. The number of Black Lanterns in existence is truly Legion, recruited from multiple different planets across the entire universe. Worst of all, while Black Lanterns do possess many elements of their former personalities, they will all kill any living thing they encounter without hesitation or remorse.

They actually have to kill people to recharge their rings. One ripped out heart, filled with one of the seven emotions, equals 0.01% power restored to every ring. Not that they need the incentive.

Worse yet, even though they're magic zombies revived by power rings, their bites still carry part of The Virus. Hope the rest of the universe is more savvy than Donna Troy.

The series Crossed is a 28-days series done with Garth Ennis' subtle touch. The infected like to rape people to death and do other absolutely horrific things. They do not lose their intelligence and they can talk. Oh, boy do they talk. The crossed will prey on each other if there are no uninfected around, and they get bored. Ennis calls this the most fucked up thing he's ever done.

Zombo had this as a background in the far future, where a zombie apocalyse is sweeping through the galaxy, and being hushed up by the government. The eponymous Zombo is a human/zombie hybrid (DON'T TRY TO THINK ABOUT IT) created by the govenment to fight back. Zombies personalities are exactly the same as when they were alive, except they now crave human flesh. It's a weird story, even by 2000AD standards...

Previous to Crossed Ennis wrote a Judge Dredd / Strontium Dogcrossover zombie apocalypse story called "Judgement Day". The necromagus Sabbat has zombies attack every Mega-City on Earth, overrunning five (which Dredd has nuked) and killing three billion before being stopped. Mega-City One's response to the zombies, by the way, is "Estimate sixty million plus! OPEN FIRE!"

Another 2000 AD strip, Defoe, involves a motley crew of adventurers fighting zombies in the 17th century using weapons provided by Isaac Newton and Robert Hook.

The comic Dead Eyes Open takes the Zombie Apocalypse and turns it on its head: people are rising again as the undead, yes, but the undead are intelligent, mostly want to be left alone, and are generally in more danger from the living than vice versa. One character is also trying to invoke the Zombie Apocalypse in the most literal way possible — ie, creating an apocalypse that will wipe out all the zombies.

A UK-original story in the MarvelTransformers Generation 1 comic involves a plague of reanimated Transformer corpses overrunning Kalis city-state under the command of rogue Autobot Flame, which forced Autobot and Decepticon to join forces to defeat them.

Impaler depicts the start of a Vampire Apocalypse which, by the end of the second volume, reached Class 0 proportions, with no sign of stopping. Possessing the ability to become Made of AirLiving Shadows and manifest long shadow Combat Tentacles, it only takes two days for what started as a few dozen vampires to become a few million and infest New York City to the point where it has to be nuked. It takes less time for them to wipe out Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

Damn Nation takes place five years after a Vampire Apocalypse has mostly wiped out the United States. The government has abandoned the lower 48 states, and the rest of the world has put the country under quarantine.

The near-future "found journal" Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection, which is presented as the journal of Seattle doctor Robert Twombly, has the western seaboard of the United States and some of Canada overcome with a zombie uprising in 2012 caused by, of all things, an experimental food preservative gone bad. Although Twombly is implied to have been killed at the end, since his journal cuts off with a blood splatter on the last page the fact it was found and published suggests (in the context of the journal's universe) the zombies were successfully stopped somehow.

Zombies Calling has a zombie apocalypse taking place in a campus on a university.

Horror/dark fantasy publisher Chaos! Comics had one carried out by one of its own flagship characters, Evil Ernie. The zombie apocalypse was limited to the eastern United States, eventually spilling out across the country during the company's own Crisis Crossover. After that event established a multiverse for Chaos!, there was supposed to be a title using established characters in a world after the Zombie Apocalypse, but Chaos! went under before it saw print.

Afterlife with Archie is a zombie apocalypse set in the Archie Comics universe. Sabrina the Teenage Witch is disturbed from her sleep by her friend Jughead Jones, whose beloved pet dog was struck by a car. Though her Aunts try their best, there is nothing to be done - Hot Dog is long dead. However, Sabrina is moved by Jughead's plight and they plot a way to bring him back. Naturally, the spell goes awry, and Jughead becomes the Patient Zero of a full-blown Zombie Apocalypse right in the heart of Riverdale.

Harley Quinn Volume 3 starts with Coney Island invaded by zombies. Their origin? An alien named Vertigax crash-landing on a farm and disguising himself as a cow, who accidentally gets butchered. After the meat-processing, we see that Vertigax has been shipped all over as various meat products (particularly Coney Island hot dogs), contaminating everyone who eats him. This, naturally, results in zombies.

Comic Strips

The Far Side once had a strip depicting the "Night of the Living Dead Chipmunks".

In the Mass Effect and Jurassic Park fusion fic Tyrant Kings, Khar'shan (the Batarian homeworld) suffers two at nearly the same time, in addition to an alien invasion. The first was the result of a fungal bioweapon that turned Batarians into zombies, while the second was because the Emperor of the Hegemony decided that the way to fight the zombies was to turn loyal soldiers and civilians into Husks to fight the menace.

In the The Familiar of Zero fanfiction,The Steep Path Ahead, Albion went through one of these courtesy of Sheffield being more than a little upset over her lover's death. They had to burn the entire city down.

Not the first fanfic to present a zombie apocalypse, but Zombies uses this trope as the backbone of the plot. Its one big video game crossover and the Zombie Apocalypse is quickly wrecking civilization, and the monarchs who attempt to deal with it are summarily killed off for their efforts.

Dead in Ohio manages to combine Glee, slash and the Zombie Apocalypse. Word of God states it's a Crossover with Zombieland in that it takes place during the same zombie outbreak, even though the Glee characters never encounter the Zombieland characters (though the complete destruction of Columbus, Ohio in the film happens in this fic too). Not Using the "Z" Word is played with, as Puck starts calling them zombies right away, while Kurt initially states that he doesn't believe that what's walking around out there is The Undead, but if Puck wants to call them that, then fine. Notable is that, unlike many works featuring a Zombie Apocalypse, the characters here are successful in pulling off their long term plan for survival, thus avioding a Downer Ending.

Under Cover Of Darkness: A Magic School Bus fanfic in which an older Ms. Frizzle's class has to survive a mauler apocalypse. It's one big Shout-Out of The Walking Dead, though not a true crossover. While it follows a similar storyline to the tv series, there are notable differences. There are characters that share names with TWD characters, but they are not the same people, and the story isn't set in Georgia.

Respawn of the Dead asks what would happen if a Zombie Apocalypse took place in the Team Fortress 2 universe (long before the Scream Fortress event that let players use cosmetic items to turn into zombies or the "Wave 666" mission, which is a rather literal armed zombie invasion). The answer is that in spite of the game's darkly comedic setting, things would get really horrific (and really heartbreaking) really fast. In short, one of the Medics elects to recreate the technology behind respawning, which goes very bad in a big hurry.

Ashes of the Past does a variation of this to fit the setting. Early on during the first chapter of the Orange Islands arc, an entire island made of limestone spontaneously reanimated into a few million Kabuto (one of which Misty caught) and Cradily. As it turns out, Altomare is built on limestone. This allows Annie and Oakley to use the DMA on the exposed bedrock and unleash a Fossil Pokémon Apocalypse comprising of every fossil Pokémon in the history of the franchise onto the entire city. It forced Ash to summon every Pokémon on his team that was available along with all of Brock and Misty's Pokémon in order to keep it at bay, and it's greatly implied that even with the aid of all the trainers who were in town for the festival, they would've eventually been overwhelmed had Ash and the Latis not broken the damn machine.

Surprisingly enough, someone managed to make a Watchmen zombie apocalypse Alternate Universe fanfic, which you can find here, that really kicks ass. Probably because Rorschach is just about the only character that would wind up happier and saner upon becoming one of the flesh-craving undead.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels. Perhaps because the original film predates most of the zombie canon, it actually avoids many of the "rules" it is credited with creating. Some zombies in the Romero canon can move quickly, use tools, and show problem-solving ability. These abilities are increasingly developed through the sequels. Also, the term "zombie" is never actually used. They are called "ghouls" instead.

The remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) updates the setting and has a much larger cast. Zombies are also distinguished from the original by being capable of sprinting.

The Return of the Living Dead film series resulted from a dispute between John Russo and George A. Romero, which split the Night of the Living Dead sequels into two branches. Russo only lived to make the first film with his new partner Dan O'Bannon. The The Return of the Living Dead series is more campy and humorous as well as more grotesque than Romero's more famous films. The zombies have human-level intelligence, specifically eat brains rather than just human flesh, and are much more difficult to kill. The first film lampshades its departures from the original by acknowledging the existence of Night of the Living Dead as a movie within its world. One character even exclaims, "You mean the movie lied?!"

28 Days Later is a zombie film with Technically Living Zombies who are afflicted with the "rage virus," something akin to super-rabies. Zombies are called "the infected", and can spread the condition through any bodily fluid transfer.

[REC], and the American remake Quarantine document the first stage of a zombie apocalypse with an In-Universe Camera. In the Spanish version the origin is Demonic Possession and an exorcism going wrong in the American remake the zombies are afflicted by a disease described as similar to rabies and it's hinted that a mysterious tenant intentionally created the disease.

In Lamberto Bava's Dèmoni, the creatures are more like monsters than zombies, but they work with zombie rules and may have been an inspiration for straight zombie films to follow.

Blending Zombie Apocalypse with Our Werewolves Are Different, Mulberry Street gives us a virus that's transmissible by rats as well as humans (fat chance keeping those out by boarding up the farmhouse windows...), and turns infected people into rat-faced, rampaging cannibals. Subverted in that the Virus goes into remission at sunrise, restoring victims to normal, albeit not until after the protagonists have killed off their loved ones in self-defense or mercy.

Similarly, Reliquary, the sequel to Relic, has those affected by a watered-down virus (it turned you into a horrific cocktail of dinosaur/primate DNA in the original) turned into light-shunning, psychotic, rat/lizard faced things. The even more watered down version just turned you into something like a 28 Days Later zombie.

Shaun of the Dead plays the concept for laughs, while at the same time remaining faithful to the style of the Romero films. Like those films, it includes hints that zombies retain some semblance of their former personalities. It also includes a Take That! against the Twenty-Eight series. It memorably subverts the "apocalypse" part by having the military seep through and restore order within a day. It's not even clear if any country but Britain was effected.

Brilliantly skewered in the 2006 film Fido, which occurs in an alternate 1950s that is in the heyday of a zombie post-apocalypse. The zombies have been tamed into domestic servitude by a control collar. This is possible because zombie bites do not cause a change. Billy Connolly plays the eponymous character, one of the most charismatic shambling corpses ever shown on the big screen.

The Resident Evil based movie series with Milla Jovovich is more straight forward survival horror, although zombie apocalypse elements are involved from 2 on to the end.

Night of the Creeps features the alien entity infection variety, where the victims could either remain sentient or become mindless shamblers looking to continue infecting others.

Slither also includes an alien infection, where zombies are infected by parasitic worms and controlled by a hive-mind. The film is partly an Homage to and an Affectionate Parody of zombie tropes.

The French movie Les Revenants (They Came Back in international release) has 70 million people climbing out of their graves... and peacefully returning to their old lives, trying to relearn speech and basic motor functions, and generally not killing anyone.

Gangs of the Dead a.k.a. Last Rites had homeless people zombies created by radiation from a meteor that fell to earth attacking so the Latino and black gangs had to more-or-less put off their fight to stay alive.

Day of the Dead (2008) shows a virus that turns people into zombies starting out as flu symptoms. About half the town is infected and comes down with what is thought to be the flu, but then everyone infected simultaneously stops moving for about five minutes, then visibly rot from the inside out within seconds, killing them, and turning them into flesh-eating zombies.

J'Accuse! a.k.a. I Accuse! (1921) is possibly the earliest zombie apocalypse style movie ever made complete with political commentary. What starts as a typical patriotic war story of lost loves, turns into a Zombie apocalypse when the millions of dead soldiers of World War I march home from the battlefield to lay the blame for the war at the feet of those that stayed behind.

Zombieland uses the fast zombie variant. They aren't very clever at all except where required by the Rule of Funny, and are pretty much limited to basic functions such as turning doorknobs and climbing fences and scaffolding, putting their minds at about "pissed off monkey" level. They were created by The Virus and can spread it through bites. They're also seemingly immune to pain, leading to the first two of the lead's Rules of Zombieland: Cardio (zombies can run fast, making it important to be able to run faster) and the Double Tap (put another bullet into the head after taking one down to make sure).

ZA: Zombies Anonymous aka Last Rites of the Dead (2006) gives a new spin on the Zombie Apocalypse: the outbreak has happened, the dead are walking the earth, but they are still functioning — although mostly closeted — members of society. The movie is a good study on prejudice, showing the new world through the eyes of the recently-deceased Angela. Most of the living prefer the dead to stay dead, but most of the "mortally challenged" just want to be left alone; there are, of course, extremists on both sides, the living who actively hunt down the dead, and vice-versa. The social commentaries aren't subtle, and can be quite agitating at times, especially during the climax.

Colin (2008) plays the Zombie Apocalypse pretty much straight, with the eponymous zombie as the protagonist.

Tokyo Zombie is a 2005 Japanese live-action Zom-Com about a pair of bumbling Jujitsu practitioners where zombies of the shambling variety first appear by popping out of a mountainous pile of garbage, toxic waste and discarded bodies called Black Fuji. Within 5 years all of Japan is covered in zombies except for a pyramid-shaped building inside a wall where rich people have gathered for safety and to amuse themselves with zombie-on-zombie as well as zombie-on-human fights to the undeath.

Flight Of The Living Dead (2007) is a zombie movie which was clearly inspired by Snakes on a Plane, since it takes place in the confines of a commercial airliner. The film's zombies follow the Russo mould, in that they can move faster than a shamble, but the incubation time for the virus varies wildly - some are infected and do not turn until a good while afterwards, whereas some are zombified almost as soon as they die.

Heavily subverted in Dead Heat, a cops vs. zombies movie with a Whodunnit to Me? plotline. Police detective Treat Williams dies in the line of duty, but is brought back temporarily with a resurrection device concocted by the corrupt scientist he was investigating. No apocalypse is forthcoming and no flesh/brain-eating ensues, as the zombies retain their free will if they're revived immediately after death and are compliant Mooks if resurrected a bit later.

Dead Air continues the tradition of virus-infected Technically Living Zombie films, with the infection being caused by a compound spread by terrorist attacks in the United States' major cities.

The fan remake for Plan 9 from Outer Space seems to be playing this up, majorly. On that note, the original also has a (badly) attempted one.

Rockabilly Zombie Weekend seems to get to apocalyptic levels, as the method of transfer (government mosquito repellent sprayed over the tri-county area, plus infected mosquitoes and spiders) allows for it to randomly spread to many places at once without a single Patient Zero that can be quarantined; within a few hours, the entire area is seemingly entirely populated by a few dozen survivors, a handful of soldiers with minimal equipment, and the zombies. A CB radio check with another survivor confirms that the highways to the airport are blocked, though it's unclear if it's due to massive death and destruction or massive traffic trying to flee.

Warm Bodies and its adaptations are set against the backdrop of a Zombie Apocalypse. It's a Romantic Comedy: apparently, when a zombie in the setting of the movie version eats brains, they get some of the memories of the victim, and if that victim's girlfriend is nearby...

Cockneys vs. Zombies sees a zombie infestation grip modern day London, with a group of five criminals, their two hostages-turned-allies (well, for one of them) and expletive loaded granddad fighting against the Romero style hordes roaming old London town, with a number of regular tropes lampshaded in the process.

In Zombie Cult Massacre zombies were initially created by an evil cult leader but those bitten and/or killed by zombies also rise from the dead.

Raymond E. Feist's Saga of Recluce has the Black Slayers: dead warriors called back to life using necromancy, or in one case, using the authority of the Goddess of Death. Once called, they are virtually unstoppable, where even severed body parts will wriggle towards each other to reassemble. Near the end of the Serpentwar, a magic-user casts a spell that continuously reanimates all corpses in the battlefield to do their bidding. This has friendly and enemy soldiers both being killed off and rising again to fight for the magic user.

Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide is a handbook on how to survive a zombie apocalypse. Its advice is based around classic zombie behavior that is not quite rooted to any specific source. It breaks down the hazards and strategies in detail, from zombie strengths and weaknesses to effective combat tactics.

Max Brooks' next effort, World War Z is a mockumentary of a past zombie invasion, conducted in a series of interviews with survivors from around the world. The interviews are ordered so as to take the reader through the war chronologically, from "Patient Zero" to the Zombie Apocalypse to the eventual human victory. The interviews are supposedly conducted by Max Brooks himself. When The Zombie Survival Guide is mentioned and criticized, the "interviewer" says, "Oh really?"

In Teresa Edgerton's The Moon and the Thorn, Lord Cernach causes the Cauldron of Cerridwen to be recreated, which has the power to create an army of phantoms every twelve hours. Cernach's stated intention during the design phase of the work was to use it to extort concessions from Mochdreff's Governor, who preferred diplomacy to military action. Cernach becomes Ax-Crazy, and uses the cauldron.

Brian Keene's Dead Sea features a zombie plague that also affects cats, dogs, and rodents in addition to humans. After the characters flee the land for the sea, they discover that the plague is spreading to other mammals and eventually fish. By the end, the plague has reached the birds. Zombies do not result from demonic possession in this book as they do in his other books.

It does contain a 'blink and you'll miss it' reference to an incident in The Rising so it may be a case of Unreliable Narrator.

The Rising and its sequel City of the Dead by Brian Keene play with several zombie tropes. As a result of a scientist messing with things he oughtn't to mess with, a portal to Dimension Hell is opened. Now, every time any animal above the level of "bug" dies it is possessed with a malignant, sadistic demon with one purpose: kill more creatures and let more of its buddies into the world. So we get zombie animals: zombie cats, zombie birds, zombie rats, zombie hump-backed camels, heck, zombie alligators in New York City's sewer system. As noted in the introduction above, zombie animals equals totally screwed. At the end of the second novel, the zombies win. They succeed in wiping out all higher animals and move on to bugs, plants and unicellular creatures. Their ultimate goal is to make Earth a lifeless hulk before moving on to other worlds and then to storm the gates of Heaven itself.

Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels: Castle Storm features a being called a "ghoul", but effectively it's a zombie; the villain resurrects a badger corpse via (surprisingly disturbing for a kids' book) necromantic rituals. The resulting being obeys his every command, but displays a hint of personality in a Shout-Out to Frankenstein when it begs him not to call it a "monster".

In the Stephen King short story "Home Delivery", an object orbiting the Earth (either an asteroid covered with seriously weird worm-like creatures, or it's worms all the way down...) is somehow causing the dead to reanimate. The story was originally published in a collection of Romero homages called The Book of the Dead.

Similarly, Cell, another King zombie novel, has people turned into zombies by cell phones.

In H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West–Reanimator, Dr. Herbert West devises a chemical that will bring dead people back to life. Unfortunately the subjects either die (again) within minutes or turn into flesh-eating creatures that share more that a slight resemblance with your average zombie (they retain normal human strength and speed though). He eventually get better at reanimating, creating an intelligent zombie who can reanimate more bodies. The intelligent zombie then leads an army of other zombies to kill Dr. West.

Hell, the spine is their weak spot (as the head is the weak spot in normal zombies), since the chemical is injected into the spine.

Jonathan Maberry's book Zombie CSU The Forensics of the Living Dead is a What If? scenario in book form. The author has interviewed Real Life Police, SWAT, doctors, hospitals, 911, and even DHS about what they would be doing to react if the Zombies began walking the earth. Delightfully enough, all the agencies and groups interviewed in the book had already given the question some consideration and had strategies formulated. Yes, even theDHS.

His novel Patient Zero, has a genetically engineered version of The Virus (that infected unusually fast via parasites and prions along with the viral cocktail) that creates Zombies used as a weapon by jihadist terrorists who come up with a strain that allows for smart zombies.

His other novel Dead Of Night has an engineered version of The Virus that was meant to leave a serial killer awake in his own rotting corpse, Buried Alive. Unfortunately, instead, it raised him as a zombie, and an intelligent one. The resulting Zombie Apocalypse got contained, but they never found and stopped patient zero.

Richard Matheson's 1954 book I Am Legend, while it was about vampires and not zombies, is an important precursor to the genre. Matheson's novel was adapted into the films The Last Man on Earth, the most faithful adaptation, and later into The Omega Man, which apes the then-recent Night of the Living Dead to a degree and turns the vampires into Luddite photophobic albino mutants produced by biological warfare. The most 2007 adaptation, I Am Legend, has the infected more like an odd cross between zombies and vampires.

In Robert R. McCammon's They Thirst, Los Angeles is overtly taken over by a Vampire Monarch and his servants. With each person bitten becoming a new vampire. He uses a magical device that creates a perpetual sandstorm around the city to keep people inside during the day, while at night the vampires raid homes. By the end of the book, there are hundreds of thousands of vampires.

David Moody's Autumn series is somewhat novel in its setup: the story begins with 99% of the world population dying - in the following weeks, some of the victims get better. The most novel aspect of his approach is that for the majority of the first book, the zombies are benign, just wandering about at random, with the result that we can see that "Holy crap, dead people are getting up and walking around," is really freaking scary entirely independent of the possibility of being eaten by a zombie. Of course, at the end, the zombies do become violent, and the whole thing just slips into the mold of the standard survivalist zombie apocalypse story. It is also somewhat novel in that the protagonists plan, for most of the story, to simply wait the zombies out, on the assumption that they will eventually decay past the point of mobility.

A good half of Clark Ashton Smith's work features Zombies of the non-contagious variety, generally custom animated by necromancers. In at least one case they 'outlive' their creators and carry on with what they were doing before they died.

John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, while concerned with genetically engineered Man Eating Plants, foreshadows many themes of the contemporary Zombie Apocalypse. Society collapses after an atmospheric event causes mass blindness. The sighted and unsighted alike struggle to scavenge a living while being hunted by this new predator. Eventually the sighted protagonists retreat to the countryside and barricade themselves in a farm house, fending off repeated Triffid attacks. The book is heavy with social commentary and contains memorably hellish imagery of shambling, groping masses of humanity. The Triffids themselves have a rickety, limping gait and are slow moving, awkward creatures of little threat individually (unless they catch you unawares). In large numbers, however, they are a serious menace; able to force their way in anywhere and seemingly capable of rudimentary communication and organization. The most effective way of stopping one is to 'decapitate' it using special blade firing weapons. It has been adapted as a lightweight 1962 monster movie (casts the Triffids as extraterrestrial plants) and a more faithful (albeit stagey) 1981 television series, and then again as a TV series in 2009.

Another Warhammer 40,000 example: the second Soul Drinkers novel features the ridiculously powerful mutant-psyker Teturact, who would induce these, then bring it to a halt while forcing any survivors to worship him as a god. His main starship has been set up so that it can self-destruct and provide a drop assault Zombie Apocalypse.

David Wellington's Monster Island and its sequels provide Romero-style zombies with an exception: if your brain is provided with oxygen between death and before returning as a zombie, you return as an intelligent zombie which the sequels call a lich. The dead are reanimated as a result of a scientist having pierced the source of Life Energy, causing the world to overflow with life energy, reanimating the dead. The trilogy is available online.

"The Concord Virus" is a rather traditional example of this trope. It's a short story, but it manages to get the job done.

This was one theory about what some of the bad guys in the Old Kingdom trilogy had in mind, since hordes of zombies are their favorite mooks and they were taking thousands and thousands of refugees into the country. Unfortunately, they were actually thinking a bit bigger than what Sabriel and Touchstone were expecting.

Happened in Fire Sea, third book of The Death Gate Cycle. In this case the effect was not pandemic but might as well have been (almost all the zombies were necromancers in life and simply animated every corpse they came across) and rather than being mindless they were sentient but Ax-Crazy with hatred for the living (except for Kleitus, the leader of said undead, who was still Ax-Crazy but also smart enough to have vision- he was gunning for ruling an entire zombified universe.) Mercifully, they were contained on just one world of the series multiverse at the end of the novel, and in the climactic volume Kleitus was killed in battle and the rest of the undead were destroyed by what could best be described as "cosmic reshuffling".

The Newsflesh series by Mira Grant (pseudonym of Seanan McGuire), in which bloggers and geeks are the only reason that humanity survived the Rising. Subverts and lampshades lots of related tropes, while playing others straight (notably zombie animals: any mammal over 40 pounds will reanimate upon death).

Walter Greatshell's Xombies series deals with an odd combination of Romero and Russo rules; the titular 'xombies' are the result of a contaminant which can only infect dead people (due to the fact that it has to bond to anaerobic hemoglobin, or a blood protein that isn't bound to oxygen). The zombies in this series are especially dangerous because they literally can't be killed. Separated body parts are sometimes more dangerous than actual zombies. In the second book, it is revealed that the zombie apocalypse was an attempt by its creator to avoid a far worse apocalypse from a comet/spaceship from Saturn's moon Encaladus.

In the episodic ebook series Zombies! by Ivan Turner, a savvy 17 year old is the first to alert the authorities to the threat, thus subverting the trope because the authorities handle it carefully and sensibly enough that your average citizen doesn't even notice the undead walking among them.

Another Biblical example, this one involving a sort of inversion: In the Book of Ezekiel, piles of bones are assembled and fleshed out. They then receive the breath of life from God, and form an army. (They are probably more in the category of Technically Living Zombie or even Back from the Dead, though.)

In the 1961 novel The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles by Robert Moore Williams, mutated protein molecules invade Southern California, turning people into flesh-eating zombies.

The web-novel Domina is about a number of super-powered zombies called "screamers" attacking an island city. Hasn't hit the actual apocalypse stage yet, but the Reasonable Authority Figure is rightly worried.

Rot & Ruin takes place about 15 years after an unexplained Zombie apocalypse, and while the zombies are relatively easy to kill (zombie hunters tend to make a game of it) the society is still kind of in shock, so the idea of any organised take-back-the-earth campaign fails to gain traction when it's brought up. Something of an unusual example in that while the main characters do kill Zombies, one of the main points of the book is that just because they're walking around doesn't mean they're not someone's dead relative who deserves respect

Diario de un Zombi has this as the setting for a depopulated Barcelona. Add in unstoppable biomechanical horrors and cultists.

Subverted in That Is All; the Zombie Apocalypse is one of the few things that doesn't occur during the Ragnarok of 2012. The only creatures that rise from the dead are taxidermied animals, and they are harmless because they are all mounted on wooden planks.

In the children's book Zombiekins, an elementary school is infected by a magical teddy bear that carries a zombie plague that is ignored by the teachers because it causes the infectees to quietly move in orderly straight lines and take their seats at the sound of the bell. They obey every school rule except the one about not biting other students. Since it's a children's book, the condition does turn out to be reversible.

In Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick, some sort of electromagnetic pulse instantly kills all adults and turns most teenagers into zombies.

Comes up in Galaxy of Fear: City of the Dead. Long ago the people of Necropolis killed a witch's son, and she cursed them, saying that if they did not respect the dead, the dead would rise and destroy them. A mad scientist, looking to create an army of zombies, started raising corpses using a serum. The resulting undead follow orders and don't bite, but are tremendously strong and tireless. He ended up applying a lot of the serum to the massive graveyards, besieging the Necropolitans. The heroes were able to come up with a counterserum which they applied liberally to all the undead - it's a children's book, but this serum simply turned zombies back into corpses which then had to be reburied.

Dark Inside has similar themes to this, but they're not exactly zombies. Rather than being mindless monsters, something turns the majority of citizens into amoral, thrill-seeking, violent monsters who retain full brain capacity and personality traits. Their only pleasure is to hunt and kill, for the sake of it.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, wights are undead zombies created by and under the command of the Others, which are essentially ice demons. Wights have blue-glowing eyes and are particularly vulnerable to fire. Wildlings north of the Wall, where the Others are located, burn their dead to prevent them from returning as wights. As the series begins, Others are becoming more aggressive and amassing large armies of wights, seemingly in preparation for an invasion of the kingdoms to the south. And what's worse, absolutely nobody down south is preparing for it because as far as they're concerned, the Others are just made-up. Boy are they in for a surprise.

In the Patternist series, a sci-fi version of this happens when the starship Clay's Ark returns to Earth contaminated with an alien virus that turns humans into predatory savages. While not literally undead, and still possessing some intelligence and cunning, the "Clayarks" as they are called are basically zombies in all but name, including the ability to spread their disease to others creating more of the their kind. Eventually they overrun the world and destroy civilization, except for fiefdoms controlled by the psychic"Patternists".

John Ringo's Black Tide Rising series is about a virus that turns people into Technically Living Zombies and about one family's efforts to both survive themselves and to save as many others as possible. Ringo decided to write it because of his oft stated dislike for most examples of the genre.

Kill the Dead, a novel in the Sandman Slim series has the title anti-hero dealing with the dead rising en mass in Los Angeles. In the end he winds up destroying every zombie in the greater LA area and possibly every one in the world.

In Undead on Arrival, the apocalypse was five years ago and humans have pretty much lost.

Hermes: He's actually a decent enough chap. A bit inexorable. A tad strict, perhaps, but it's his job to keep the dead out of the world of the living. You don’t want someone like me in charge of that. One good distraction and wham! Zombie apocalypse!

In Expedition Z the zombie apocalypse (AKA the Fall) happened 20 years ago that at this point the main character's father points out there shouldn't be any zombies out in the wild after having starved to death about 7 years ago.

Sergey Lukyanenko's Quazi takes place about ten years after a zombie apocalypse. Starting in 2017, whenever a person dies, he or she comes back as a mindless, ravenous zombie about 20 minutes later. The Risen can only be killed by destroying the brain or through decapitation. After a while, some Risen become intelligent beings again, who start calling themselves Quazi (note the "z"). Only a small percentage of the Risen have become Quazi, and no one knows why, just like no one has been able to figure out why the dead rise (some assume it's simply a global infection that is dormant until death). The Quazi have bluish-gray skin and don't retain many emotions. They do tend to be peaceful. A full-fledged human vs. Quazi war was stopped in several countries, including Russia, US, and Germany, but several countries have been completely wiped out by the apocalypse. Vast tracts of Russian lands are now filled with ravenous hordes and traveling through them requires the use of armored trains or joining a convoy of specially-equipped vehicles. Moscow remains the bastion of the Russian living with fortifications built up along the Automotive Ring Road, while St. Petersburg has become the capital of the Russian Quazi nation. Interestingly, the Quazi are vegetarian unlike their mindless brethren. Their digestive systems can only process organic foods. The Quazi are unable to develop mentally and are stuck at whatever state they were at death. Their primary goals during their lives become their primary goals upon awakening as Quazi. As a rule, Quazi tend to be logical and unemotional. The protagonist of the novel is a Mortal Affairs Inquirer named Denis Simonov with a grudge against all undead after losing his wife and son during the apocalypse. His responsibility is to be the first on the scene during suspected deaths in order to immobilize or kill any newly-risen. His boss is concerned that most of his "visits" end with the Risen being killed in "self-defense", so she partners him with a Quazi cop. Denis later finds out that, in order to become a Quazi, a Risen has to eat a part of a living human brain. Worse, his partner is one of the Risen, who killed his wife, becoming a Quazi shortly after and saving Denis's infant son, raising the boy as his own.

Marlee Pagels's Along The Winding Road uses this as a background element. While there are still a few zombies ambling about four years afterwards, it's implied that they were much more formidable enemies at the start of the apocalypse.

The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign has a variant in which each individual "zombie" is a copy of an Eldritch Abomination with the power to easily destroy the world. In the seventh volume, the White Queen demonstrates the ability to turn humans into copies of herself by biting them, with the copies being fully subservient to her. Though unlike most Zombie Apocalypses, she can't infect just anyone - she can only infect humans with an innate disposition to being easily possessed by spirits.

How To Survive the End of the World from National Geographic actually had an episode called Zombie Earth where a mutation of the Rabies virus was the cause.

Mythbusters devoted an episode to surviving an attack by a zombie horde. Among their findings: an axe is a more effective weapon than a shotgun, and pushing your buddy into their numbers may give you a better chance of escaping yourself. It was odd how they kept saying, "Even though Zombies aren't real..."

Spoofed on an episode of Happy Endings: Max and Jane get into a dispute leading to a Zombie Apocalypse Olympics that tests athletic prowess, ability to be still, aim, and ruthlessness. Jane eventually wins by demonstrating ruthlessness in pushing Max out in front of a group of hungry, hungry hipsters, even though Max had earlier claimed that ruthlessness was his strong suit.

The Borg of Star Trek fame are almost Zombies IN SPACE!! One guest star even referred to them as cybernetic zombies.

The two-part serial "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" is a neat twist on the Zombie Apocalypse, with alien medical nanobots encountering a dead human child, assuming that's the human baseline, and rebuilding him and all other humans they encounter as shambling corpses. The walking corpses in the earlier episode "The Unquiet Dead" are closer, but they are actually hosts for the ghost-like aliens called the Gelth.

"New Earth" set in a hospital in the year 5 billion and twenty-three on, naturally enough, a New Earth which is run by cat people. Towards the end, we find out that the doctors have been growing people in an enormous area under the hospital and exposing them to various diseases from the moment of their conception, which has turned them into your common-or-garden Romero zombie. Of course, the buggers get out and mischief ensues.

The Sarah Jane Adventures did a zombie-themed story for the show's pilot episode, "The Invasion of the Bane". In this case, the zombie effect is caused by consuming a new energy drink that turns out to be a symbiotic life form. The resulting zombies try to force others to drink the stuff.

The UK horror series Dead Set involves a zombie apocalypse in Britain, with the plot revolving around the contestants of Big Brother as they are trapped in the house.

A season three episode had people being turned into zombies due to a mask that contains the powers of a Nigerian zombie demon. Zombies aren't really her thing.

The alternate timeline created in the Season 3 episode "The Wish" is a vampire variant.

Degrassi: The Next Generation had a Halloween special called Degrassi of the Dead in which genetically-modified food turns people into zombies, leaving the few surviving students to fight for their lives to escape.

Although they are not real, in an episode of Spaced, "Art", Tim takes some bad speed and plays Resident Evil 2, essentially making him hallucinate a zombie attack throughout the whole episode. The Twiglets he ate at the party didn't help either.

Discovery's The Colony is a reality TV show that takes place after a simulated "viral catastrophe". It's basically a zombie apocalypse with the zombies cut out.

An episode of Smallville called "Rabid" dealt with a zombie apocalypse.

Though not a classic example, the dark future of the Dollhouse resembles a Zombie Apocalypse. A signal was sent to all telephones on the planet that would wipe the listeners' minds, and program them to kill anybody who didn't hear the signal. In result rabid hordes of lunatics hunt down the few remaining normal people in the ruins of the civilization; a very strong similarity with this trope.

That Mitchell and Webb Look features a recurring sketch about a game show taking place in a world where an unspecified, but clearly horrific and traumatising, "Event" has happened. Food is scarce, there are no more children, there are frequent exhortations to "Remain Indoors" and the survivors live in terror of a mysterious Them, who look like us because they used to be us. It is later revealed that They are sephulchral voiced, red-eyed zombies with a taste for human flesh. Oh. And they've got in. It's hinted that this is not the worst part of the "Event".

The Sliders had an alternate dimension Earth, where, get this, a new "fat burning" medicine causes a Zombie Apocalypse. The drug was meant to "eat away" fat and an antidote would be taken to end the effect... However something went horribly wrong and millions of people started to hunger for fat, even if that fat was of another human. For some reason these zombies also became very sensitive to light, possibly having something to do with the zombies becoming excessively pale. Also the zombies aren't of the risen dead variety, but will die without feeding as the medicine - possibly an engineered virus considering it transfers with getting bitten - will simply eat them alive if they don't get fat to their system..

The X-Files episode "Millennium" deals with a zombie apocalypse with the advent of Y2K. Obviously, going back and watching this episode over a decade later, it doesn't hold nearly the same punch as it did when it first aired in 1999.

The second season Halloween episode of Community deals with a zombie plague breaking out in the college. The group must try to escape, reach the thermostat to lower the temperature, and not be driven insane by the "Mama Mia!" soundtrack.

Misfits has a zombie episode in the third season. Curtis brings a cat back from the dead, zombie apocalypse ensues, body count sky rockets.

Derren Brown's Apocalypse special sets up a fake apocalypse scenario in order to get an unsuspecting guy to man up and take responsibility for his life, as well as to start appreciating those around him. After a series of fake news reports about an impending meteor strike, the guy is on a bus traveling to a (fake) rock concert when pieces of the meteor start to fall all around him. He passes out (put into a trance by Derren) and wakes up in a deserted hospital seemingly two weeks later with a news report warning about a Rage Plague brought by the meteor fragments. Then crazy people start chasing him and his young companion (naturally, all of them are actors). The special is inspired by the 2012 end-of-the-world fears.

Syfy's original series Z Nation takes place after a zombie apocalypse has destroyed civilization, and is about a group of survivors trying to get the one man with a zombie cure in his blood to a laboratory that can synthesize his blood to make a vaccine. Society at large is gone, but there are small communities riding it out with success since by now it's a World of Badass.

Nicky Ricky Dicky And Dawn: In "Field of Brains" after watching a horror zombie movie, the quads think their parents are zombies. After escaping to theor parents' store, they then think others are also zombies.

In the Flesh is set three years after zombies rose from their graves to attack the living...and then the government actually found a cure. The main character is a Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferer who's trying to re-integrate into a society which now hates him and come to terms with the guilt of the people he killed when rabid.

I Survived A Zombie Apocalypse is a BBC Three reality show where a 5G network caused humans to mutate into zombies. The Survivors need to perform challenges while also avoiding the zombies, with the ones who are so much as touched being Killed Off for Real.

Masters of Horror: In Joe Dante's "Homecoming", fallen U.S. soldiers rise from the dead en masse to vote out the administration that sent them to war. It's only when said administration starts treating them like horror movie zombies that the violence begins...

iZombie: Liv is afraid of one happening, or inadvertently starting one herself, but because zombies retain their intelligence so long as they can occasionally eat brains the spread of zombies is happening more akin to a vampire infestation, with specific people being inducted into zombie-hood deliberately to gain leverage over them.

Episode New Year's Eve of the antology series Fear Itself is about a Zombie Apocalypse with a very interesting twist the protagonist was a zombie all the time.

Grimm: Zombie Apocalypse trough Hate Plague can be caused by yellow fever if this affects Wesen, as shown in episode You Give Me…Yellow Fever?, its seem to have happened before in the past. Of course, the Wesen known as Baron Samedi can also turn people into the more traditional zombie.

Game of Thrones: Like A Song of Ice and Fire above, White Walkers are neck and neck with Daenerys as The Dreaded. Disappeared to the point of being considered a myth, stories of seeing them are scoffed at by everyone south of the Neck (The North still seems to believe that the White Walkers actually existed). But when they are seen, or heard as the Mass "Oh, Crap!" at hearing the fabled three horn blasts demonstrate, the only course of action is Don't Ask, Just Run. The White Walkers seem intent on building an army of "wights", undead corpses resurrected to act as footsoldiers to march south and overrun Westeros, which they have been doing since the Long Night. Seemingly there is nothing that is able to stop the White Walkers and the Wights can only be killed by fire, dragonglass, or Valyrian steel. Vast swathes beyond the Wall have been overrun by wights. This is why so many wildlings (such as Osha and her original group) are fleeing south, and why many of the wildling factions are banding together to fight their way into the south. The Season 2 finale has an entire army of wights going to attack the Night's Watch, led by the White Walkers. Season 7 ends with their invasion of Westeros finally beginning, as the Night King, using an undead Viserion, brings down part of the Wall to let his army march through.

Costa Rican TV series Diario de la Peste has the Zombie Apocalypse as main theme.

"Shoot To Kill" by thrash-metal band Warbringer is about gunning down zombies. Boom Headshot indeed.

"Re: Your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton. The narrator, Bob, is a zombie who seems to have been made merely sociopathic by zombification, rather than mindless, since he retains his sapience and incredibly middle-management personality while attempting to persuade his co-worker Tom to let him eat his brains. Other zombies are mentioned, but they seem to be the standard nonsapient kind ("...my colleagues, who were chewing on the doors").

The music video for Metallica's "All Nightmare Long". Soviet scientists find a new lifeform which spores can reanimate the dead even three weeks after death. They use it to conquer the United States by raising an army of their own dead in the 1940's and they lose control of it in the 1970's.

Most of Cannibal Corpse's album covers and quite a number of their songs feature zombies (and the same goes for the bajillion gory death metal bands they inspired). The name itself, according to bassist Alex Webster, refers to a zombie who feeds on other zombies.

"This is a slow one...grab your girl...and then shoot her in the head!"

The Devil Wears Prada's concept EP "Zombie", as the name implies, centers around one of these. The lyrics and sound clips in between songs (such as the quote at the top of the page) rely heavily on the genre's many clichés.

Part of the Meta Plot of mc chris'note his name is not capitalized music. After he's assassinated in Dungeon Master of Ceremonies by his Recording Agent in an attempt to invokeDead Artists Are Better, chris returns in mc chris is dead as a sentient zombie leading an army of the undead to get revenge.

''I wait 'till they day's end when the moon is high Then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life I'll amass an army, yo I'll harness a horde Then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore.

She does it again in Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld, sort of a Spin-Off of the Epic of Gilgamesh. She uses the Zombie Apocalypse threat against the gatekeeper of the underworld, and after deliberating with Irkalla's queen (Inanna's sister Ereshkigal), he agrees to let her in, on the condition that she remove her clothing and jewelry at a series of checkpoints.

For their April Fools 2008 issue, The University at Buffalo's Spectrum college newspaper reported, among other things, about the emergence of the Necro-Animatory Syndrome virus, and the rise of the ambulatory dead ("zombie" being an "outdated and offensive term," though Bush is quoted as nearly using it) out of Cape Canaveral, where the NAS virus had apparently come back with a space shuttle crew. Articles included general information, survival guide, how to recognize an NAS sufferer (not very hard), and what to do if you're bitten (die with dignity, and with a friend to take you out immediately).

The BBC put out another article, this time playing on the Swine Flu scare (H1Z1, a mutation of the H1N1 virus that reanimated the victim after death, who then showed signs of the usual zombie behaviour). It is of course, fake, but the comments on the page are well worth reading.

Tabletop Games

The tabletop role playing game All Flesh Must Be Eaten is all about surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, with a variety of different Apocalypses in different settings (called "Deadworlds").

The back story for Unhallowed Metropolis puts a subtle but significant spin on this trope by having the first Plague outbreak occur in 1905. This is also the kind where anyone who dies may come back — although it's only a sure thing if they died of a bite from a zombie, there's a chance of it for any corpse, with the odds depending on the surrounding environment.

It's also hinted that zombies might be the least of the world's problems. Bizarre wastelands expanding throughout the world, reports of unnameable horrors and mind-rending blasphemies in the jungles of Africa and beneath the streets of London, hints that the people of the Crimean peninsula have undergone an unwholesome transformation that makes the degenerate ghouls and feral vampires look tame by comparison, Hong Kong somehow having become a true necropolis where zombies can survive long past when they should have desiccated into immobility... clues abound that the Zombie Apocalypse is just the most visible symptom of something having gone deeply wrong with the world on some fundamental level.

Zombies make up the bulk of the armies of the undead Vampire Counts (alone with other classic horror creatures like wights, ghouls and giant bats). They also use undead dire wolves. These zombies are reanimated corpses animated by the will of the vampire or necromancer who raised them and are slow and weak, relying on numbers to make any impact. Since Vampire Counts magic-users can effectively grow them out of the ground, numbers are NOT something they have trouble with...

During The End Times, Nagash managed to successfully usurp the Wind of Death from Morr, the result being that all souls turned to him after dying. This is a major problem as Nagash is otherwise known as the great necromancer and effectively became the god of zombies. The result was that zombies started popping up everywhere and both undead armies no longer had a problem keeping their undead slaves alive (before this, if the necromancer animating the army died, the army would slowly crumble to dust). Nagash's actions also caused a new lore of magic to be made, which allowed any army to summon undead (of any kind) to their service.

Warhammer 40,000 brought on plague zombies during the 13th Black Crusade, courtesy of the god of pestilence and decay, and other zombie infestations have been known to be caused by Tyranids and a fair number of different plants.

Plague zombies have been part of 40k background for almost as long as the Chaos powers, and are a playable gang in the spinoff skirmish game Necromunda.

Magic: The Gathering has had zombies since the first set, but the plane of Grixis, one of the Shards of Alara, is in a successful Zombie Apocalypse, albeit with necromancers and demons at the forefront, caused by the crapping out of two types of magic good at fighting them off. In any case, humanity is boned on the plane. Note that in Magic, zombies are notThe Virus; they cannot create more of their own kind through infection, but are instead created from corpses by Evil Sorcerers.

Grave Titan has zombies crawling out of its chest. Every time it attacks it gives birth to more.

The board game Zombies!!!, which seems to owe some influence to Resident Evil (the players have to shoot the zombies, and they win the game by escaping in a helicopter).

The GURPS Infinite Worlds setting has the Gotha timelines. Those are about twenty known parallel worlds where civilization was wiped out by the "Gotha Plague": a mutant disease that causes infectees to behave like the 28 Days Later variety. It specifies that the Plague has trouble establishing itself in small communities, so civilization on these worlds is in small enclaves.

The Gotha Zombies have a few differences from other zombies, though; they're semi-intelligent, and function more like a highly aggressive chimpanzee tribe in terms of organization than anything else. They're quite willing to eat zombies from other "tribes", and will even eat their own if there isn't any other food available.

They also retain just enough of their memory to fall back on some tribal customs from the group they belonged to—the reason worlds with them are called the Gotha Parallels is because the first contact with such a timeline resulted in the research team nearly being devoured by infected Gothic berserkers. Other worlds have zombie Thuggees, zombie Vikings, and so on.

Dead Reign features a mish-mash of zombie tropes and abilities. (The majority of the Zombies are tough, slow-moving ones, but there are also fast zombies, thinking zombies, zombies that don't believe they're zombies, and "half-dead".)

The Corpse Factories in the Feng Shui supplement Glimpse of the Abyss are Buro-created superzombies that are markedly more intelligent than the non-infectious zombies that they create. Only five of these things exist in 2056, and if just one of them gets loose, it's Zombie Apocalypse time, particularly since the Necromantic Implanter, an arcanowave device that every corpse factory is equipped with, can be used to turn regular zombies into more corpse factories.

In Exalted, this is one of the favored tactics of the more militarily inclined Deathlords. High level Necromancy can raise corpses en masse, and certain spells can even corrupt an area to the point that the dead will rise of their own accord. Eye and Seven Despairs, one of the Deathlords, has even pioneered a zombie plague that works on its own accord, but is too busy tormenting the reincarnations of people who screwed with him in the First Age to actually deploy it.

Deadlands has zombies, but these things are intelligent and cunning. Makes them hard to put down. Particularly if they're intact enough to be shooting back.

Specifically, Deadlands has a lot of different kinds of undead monsters. The default are creatures called Walkin' Dead, which are basically Flesh Eating Zombies made through Demonic Possession; this means they are smart, quick and capable of using weaponry, up to and including guns. They don't even really need to eat meat, but do so for enjoyment. Baron LaCroix creates "Voodoo Zombies", which are, as the name implies, the Voodoo-style slow, stolid, mindlessly obedient shamblers. 'Gloms are animated piles of corpses that grow bigger by absorbing more into themselves — a variant called a Colony 'Glom can actually send out component bodies as Walkin' Dead... let's jus say we'd be here a while if we tried listing them all.

The World of Darkness games actually subvert the zombie apocalypse. While Zombies do exist, they're not exactly common, and aren't normally infectious.

There was an adventure done by Thomas "Wanderer" Wilde (best known for his Resident Evil plot guide) that took this trope head-on, called The Last Escape.

While there isn't necessarily an infectious means of Zombie Apocalypse, certain ghosts and spirits in the New World of Darkness have a chain of Numina that allow them to jump into a corpse, then jump into any corpse that corpse kills, then possibly invite some friends along...

Dungeons & Dragons zombies are simply mindless, reanimated corpses with no risk of infection, and are among the least dangerous of The Undead. However, there are quite a few undead with the "create spawn" ability, and several of them are incorporeal.

The "Infectious Zombie" template was provided in the 4th-edition supplement Open Grave. Unfortunately, actual rules for the zombie plague were not, despite being alluded to in the template.

In the previous edition, wights are probably the closest thing to more traditional zombies, though they had to actually kill their victims in order to turn them. A modified version of the infamous "Locate City bomb" theoretically allows the PCs to One-Hit Kill every level 1 commoner in a 10-mile-per-caster-level radius with Level Drain, which has the side effect of causing them to come back as wights and slaughter everyone who survived the initial attack.

The "Viral Deathspawn" template from D20 Modern - Apocalypse can be used in 3.5 D&D without modification (not that you should want to). It is worth noting, however, that Viral Deathspawn have only a -2 to their Intelligence score, meaning you can potentially have "zombies" smart enough to understand logistics, chain of command, sneak around, potentially use weapons and traps.

The World of Greyhawk campaign setting included a zombie variant known as a "Son of Kyuss," which was an aggressive zombie with green worms crawling about in its eye sockets. If the worms landed on someone, they burrowed under that person's skin and attempted to reach the brain, at which point the victim would become another Son of Kyuss. Given the nature of some of the beings in the game, these creatures were probably too weak to cause a full-scale apocalypse, but they could easily wipe out an entire village of zero-level humans.

In the 3.5 edition book Elder Evils, there's a world born dead, Atropus, whose coming is marked by the undead rising from their graves in a zombie apocalypse. As in some other Zombie Apocalypses, his coming may cause anyone who dies by any means (not just killed by a zombie) to rise as a zombie (or skeleton if there's not enough flesh for a zombie). When Atropus gets close enough to the planet anyone who's dead will reanimated as a skeleton or zombie by tearing out of their graves even if they were killed years ago.

One of the cards in the Epic Card Game is this. Either it results in destroying all Champions and giving all players Zombies! Or it just gives a player two cards.

The board game Last Night on Earth has several different scenarios to play through during a Zombie Apocalypse.

Strike Legion has a localized zombie outbreak as one of it's story hooks. This being Strike Legion, the zombies in question are faster than Olympic sprinters and can throw tanks.

Call of Cthulhu, Different Worlds magazine #38 adventure "The Eye of Sitar". Azathoth cultists are planning to perform a Human Sacrifice ritual at midnight on the fall equinox. If they succeed it will result in the dead rising from the grave all over the world and consuming the flesh of the living.

Theatre

Rhinoceros is a play by French author Eugene Ionesco that revolves around people spontaneously becoming rhinocerotes. They're destructive, but not violent, and one must apparently choose to become one (or at least not actively choose not to). Though mostly comedic, it still has the feel of a Zombie Apocalypse, not least because there's only one man left standing at the end.

In Dwarf Fortress, zombie apocalypses are now completely possible, and are one of the deadliest threats a fortress can face if the ball gets rolling. You see, every creature killed in evil biomes will, if not quickly cremated, reanimate and join the undead horde. This can include even the most minute body parts - even mussel shells. Once the zombies start racking up a few kills, they quickly becoming a massive ball of flesh and bones that reanimates itself faster than it can be killed. If you're really unlucky, you might instead have fog banks that turn normal creatures into horrific life-hating ghouls. Sometimes it's dust that rubs off onto things fighting with them, by which point there's nothing more to do...

Becoming one of those horrific life-hating ghouls by evil fog doesn't necessarily end an Adventuring career, and by acquiring the secrets of Necromancy, the player can become The Virus, commanding an ever-expanding horde of animated dead over the world.

Resident Evil is generally an aversion of this trope. Though the games center on zombies, they're often times small localized outbreaks of The Virus, e.g. a remote mansion or an island. Only Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 deal with anything close to a zombie apocalypse, with the virus ravaging an entire city; in the end, the military manages to put an end to it, but only by nuking the entire city.

4 and 5 are something of a variant. There is a localized "outbreak" of sorts, but it's of living humans under the control of a Puppeteer Parasite, and said humans are organized and (more or less) retain their human intelligence. The outbreaks are also very controlled and deliberate on the part of the villains, and in fact, the parasite from 4 required the victim be injected with an egg.

Resident Evil 6 kicks it up a notch with zombies ravaging two fictional cities.

The House of the Dead series. In the first game it's isolated to a mansion and the associated research facility. In the second game it's taken over Venice. In the third game it's finally consumed the entire world. The fourth game takes place before the third and it's starting to spread.

Dead Rising is similar to the above Resident Evil examples in that the USAnote they only place where there are zombies (the Zomberix Dead Rising Sun film is a Show Within a Show) is kind of tolerating the zombies. Apparently,there are zombies out in the countryside of middle and Midwestern America, but being slow and fragile, they are not that big a threat individually. The danger comes in densely populated areas; Willamette in the first game, Las Vegas in between games, and Fortune City in the second game. The rapid speed of the outbreak in Fortune City is explained by the fact that the city was hosting Terror is Reality, an American Gladiator-style reality TV show about killing zombies en masse, and someone simply destroyed the gate on the zombie pens, releasing the show's extensive stock into the city. Dead Rising 2 also reveals that there is now a standard procedure for an outbreak.

Saints Row 2 has a zombie arcade game that strongly resembles Dead Rising.

Dead Rising 3 reveals that the guy who kicked off the Zombie Apocalypse didn't want to endanger all humanity (just the USA). So while he infected most of his orphans with the zombification virus to start outbreaks across America, he also inoculated one (the protagonist) with the cure to act as a failsafe.

Alliance Of Valiant Arms has the "Infection" game mode, where random players will become zombies and must then infect the remaining players who are attempting to kill them.

Left 4 Dead is fairly nonchalant with its predicament,(Zoey) can utter the following line; "I can't get over how fast they all are. It's not even fair! I'm calling zombie bullshit on that, you know? They're not allowed to be so fast."

The Virus in Left 4 Dead also seems to be a fairly flexible type. Whilst it turns most people into common cannon fodder zombies, what little backstory exists suggests that it can target certain aspects of infectees to create the Special Infected. Infection is transferred via bite, and can take approximately an hour to set in depending on circumstances. Certain people seem to be 'blessed' with utter immunity (or were just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time; ie, offshore or in the air and nowhere near the spreading infection), making the four heroes not the sole survivors.

Thanks to the events of Left 4 Dead 2 and the comic of events taking place after Left 4 Dead 1, it's been discovered anyone who can resist being changed into a zombie are actually carriers; people who carry the virus and can't mutate, but can still spread it to others, effectively making anyone who is an immune survivor spread the virus forever. The military sees these survivors as almost an enemy to humanity and are rounding them up for quarantine so they can try to find a cure, or kill them if they can't find any.

A fan theory is that copious intake of certain substances can change your inner chemistry enough to react to the infection. The Boomers are severe alcoholics, the Smokers are multiple packs a day chain smokers, The Hunters are meth fiends, The Witches crack-addicts, and the Tanks juicers.

Also note that in the intro movie, Bill notes that the zombies are mutating, so it could be different strains of the virus.

Two things throw into doubt whether this is a true apocalypse - the military's still in reasonable shape, having the capacity to launch rescue missions and bombing runs, and it's not stated what's going on in the rest of the world.

The Military Base portrayed in the Comic seems to show the severity quite heavily. The base appears severely understaffed, with only a handful of soldiers where there should be hundreds. The base is also extremely insecure, with one soldier getting Infected and nearly killing some guards, and a Witch somehow wandering right on in. To make matters worse, it's dangerously low on supplies, and one of the Officer's is leading a mutiny against the base's Commander. The base also appears completely isolated from the rest of the Military (if it's still even around). The Military Base is ultimately destroyed by a massive zombie mob attack, and all known personnel are KIA. However, due to the Infection's inability to spread over water, the Navy in Left 4 Dead 2 seems to be operating at full capacity.

Multiple maps show that almost all the evac centers in the US have been overrun or aren't evacuating anymore. In Crash Course, the New Orleans, Midwest, and Allegheny Forest outposts are still up and running. In Dead Center, only New Orleans and the Midwest are left. The entire United States has been overrun in 2-3 weeks.

Of course, by the time you reach New Orleans in The Parish campaign, it seems to be largely overrun and abandoned, too. Bill says "As far as we know, zombies can't swim", so it's possible that islands are still safe, as long as air travel didn't bring The Infection to them.

Space Pirates and Zombies, of course. You are Space Pirates! There are Zombies! What more is there to say? Well, actually, there is quite a lot to say, as the Space Pirates have got to wonder why there are no sentient alien species to speak of... then they open the Titan Gates, which they'd known about for quite a time, and all hell breaks loose because of them. True, they are Space Pirates, the terrors of the Seven Sectors, but that's no reason for them to doom all of Humanity to a zombie fate, like all the other sentient species before them. Yes, the Zombies were waiting in the center of the Galaxy for the next species, and it it weren't for the Space Pirates' efforts, they probably would have assimilated all of Humanity.What a way to go.

Project Zomboid has Knox County being overrun by zombies with you in the middle of it. Developers state in later versions of the game, later (provided you survived that long) the zombies spread worldwide, with repercussions ingame such as no electricity for ovens or refrigerators. It uses straight-up Max Brooks rules: no fast infected, no special zombies, no zombified animals, and a single bite will always infect, no exceptions.

Both Doom and Quake, in both cases supernatural (and in neither case the main threat to humanity). In the former game, the zombies were undead foot soldiers (a few pistol shots would do one in permanently), still using the firearms they had been carrying in life (though Doom 3 introduced more regular walking corpses, which were originally intended to keep getting up as long as their corpse was intact, as revealed in a leaked beta; this was dropped from the final version because the Ragdoll Physics added to their deaths made it impractical). In the latter the zombies were shambling long-dead corpses in the Russo mould (nothing short of dismembering them with explosives would keep them down), though much more easily killed "grunts" more like the Doom zombies were found in the early levels of each episode (these may well have been still living, but possessed or otherwise mind-controlled). The Wolfenstein 3D games also had re-animated corpses as enemies, these created by Nazi Mad Science.

Quake IV features partially Stroggified humans whom for all intents and purposes behave like zombies, this is Lampshaded by another soldier.

The Doom novelization had especially creepy scenes where zombies, still bearing an imprint of their former lives, would mindlessly shamble to the grocery store, pulling rotting food from the shelves, walking past the cash register, and so on.

Quake's instruction manual explained that the Grunts had had cybernetics wired into their brain that stimulated their pleasure centers whenever they killed someone.

In Halo, the Flood, who seem to have originated from a galaxy outside of the Milky Way, are very capable of causing an apocalypse. The infection forms and airborne spores first turn any sentient lifeforms they come across into zombies. Eventually, the infected beings begin to deteriorate and bloat, releasing more infection forms, which go to infect other people and so on and so forth, until they gain enough biomass to form a variety of "Pure" Flood forms, including the Gravemind, a hyper-intelligent hive-mind containing the memories and knowledge of every single being in history to have been assimilated by the Flood. This intelligence manifests itself in the ability of the Flood to utilize complex technology, strategize, and fully communicate with non-infected beings (the last known Gravemind even had a tendency to speak in trochaic heptameter). They were so powerful that the only way the highly-advanced Forerunners managed to defeat them was activating the seven Halos in order to kill all sentient life in the galaxy and starve the Flood of their necessary nutrition. Even afterwards, they had a bad tendency of overrunning their holding facilities whenever outside interlopers stumbled upon them; they completely consumed the Halo in the first game, and end up doing the same to the Threshold research facilities, Delta Halo, and the Covenant capital city of High Charity in Halo 2. They got to Earth in Halo 3, and were only stopped by the Elite fleet glassing a huge chunk of Africa. They also nearly completely overran the massive extra-galactic Forerunner instillation known as the Ark before the current Gravemind and presumably all other Flood from the Milky Way more advanced than an infection form were finally destroyed.

The Forerunner Saga reveals that the Flood are in fact the malevolent remnants of a species known only as the Precursors, who were even more advanced than the Forerunners. There is also no true cure for it; the Flood can simply choose whether it wants to infect someone or not. The only organic sentient beings that seem truly immune to direct infection are those lacking a central nervous system, though they can still be killed and converted into Flood biomass.

Halo 3 introduced a multiplayer mode where someone is "infected" and spreads it by killing people with the energy sword, and they come back to do the same. Eventually, you have a few regular people left heading for the high ground to snipe as much as they can before being overwhelmed. It is very unlikely (though possible with a few skilled players working together) for survivors to last until the end of the round. Infection variants on modified maps make up the Living Dead weekend event, which plays on random weekends as well as on Halloween.

Well, the third game was when it was made official and programmed in as a gametype by Bungie. It was played unofficially in custom team slayer games as early as Halo 2, by designating one team a zombie team, and the other a human team. This put everybody on the honor system though, since you had to manually change teams yourself. This, combined with the fact that some hosts went by Russo rules where you have to get killed by a zombie and only by a zombie to turn, while other hosts went by Romero rules where all deaths should make a convert, predictably lead to chaos and frustration when dealing with inexperienced, stubborn, or otherwise plain stupid players.

Counter-Strike had an influence on this, where the most favored zombie mode, Infection, has the opposing side as fast-running zombies, and the other as CTs/Ts. Whoever is hit by a zombie is turned into one, and so on. The second popular mode, called Zombie Riot, is a typical zombie apocalypse and is players versus computer-controlled zombies, with no infection.

According to creators, while playing with the AI for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, they discovered that playing an outnumbered team of bots with knives only served as a makeshift zombie apocalypse scenario. This led to the creation of Left 4 Dead.

The TimeSplitters games are rather fond of zombies, and gives them amusing names like Gilbert Gastric, Daisy Dismay, and Mr. Fleshcage. The third game even had them quote a recurring line from Shaun of the Dead as a tribute, because Time Splitters 2 had a cameo in the film (as the FPS game that Ed and Shaun play).

Blood, a game created around horror movie tropes, had its fair share of zombies (the tougher variety's appearance taken directly from George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead). In the sequel, living dead were replaced by people taken over by supernatural wormlike parasitic beings.

The Half-Life series has its ubiquitous, iconic Headcrabs and the zombies they create when they attach themselves to a suitable host and commandeer its nervous system. Although incapable of infecting others directly, they otherwise behave identically to Romero zombies (Zombie Gait, mindless, dangerous in numbers, prone to Infernal Retaliation et cetera). In the original game they were weak and somewhat annoying enemies, rarely present in more than small groups. In Half-Life 2 and its Episodes however they cause two instances of this trope:

The Combine commonly use Headcrabs as a biological weapon, storing them in artillery shells which are fired on entrenched locations, the shell both causing structural damage and killing any nearby humans due to its impact or the Headcrabs it releases. When the Combine discovered Ravenholm, a small mining town used to shelter a large number of people who had fled from Combine control, it was subjected to massive bombardment by these weapons, and by the time Gordon arrives the only things he finds are corpses, hordes of Headcrab Zombies, and one shotgun-wielding Badass Preacher.

In Episode One the entirety of City 17 experiences this, the liberal use of Headcrab Shells during The Battle of City 17 and the destruction of the Citadel's Dark Fusion Reactor crippling Combine control of the region resulting in the city's underground infested with Headcrabs and zombies and the city itself under almost constant attack. With the complete detonation of the Citadel they are the only living things remaining in City 17 and even they are fleeing by Episode Two, creating a constant stream of zombies into the surrounding regions that attack humans and Combine alike. That Gordon Freeman, what a great hero.

Urban Dead. Unlike other examples, the zombies in this game are intelligent since they are controlled by players. While they do have a limited vocabulary, zombie players have come up with creative ways of in-game communication. And that's not even counting the Metagame on the forums. It also emulates the Romero model of zombies getting smarter. As they learn more skills, zombies can open doors, move faster, attack better, talk (sort of), track you down, and make a lot of noise to draw attention when they find a safehouse full of survivors. If one counts the RP, they're also highly mutated, undying, and God help us if they break from the quarantine.

The final level of The Simpsons: Hit & Run is populated by zombies that can be run over, due to Kang and Kodos infecting Springfield with BUZZ Cola for kicks and television ratings.

The game The Sims 2 has zombies (introduced in one of the expansions). A mod on one of the most popular modding sites, MATY, changes their behavior so that they will fight and infect other characters in the game. The mod, aptly enough, is called Zombie Apocalypse. It should be noted that the zombies without the mod do not do this, and control essentially the exact same as a normal sim, the only except being that they won't die of old age. (Though they do think about brains a lot...)

They Hunger, set in a small town and acres of farmland and ruins, appears to use modified Russo rules - the zombies are tough, but they're still killable and don't drop from headshots, BUT they die if they're shot anywhere for long enough. It also includes semi-infected zombies who are smart enough to still use guns, and two of them are bosses.

The grunt troops of the Scourge in Warcraft III and World of Warcraft are all zombies, reanimated by the Lich King or his necromancers. In Warcraft III, most of them are infected by contaminated food supplies rather than being killed by other zombies, although the Lich King is known to raise troops that have died in battle against the undead. Those who are freed from the Lich King's control before they decay too much will regain their sentience, but obviously remain as rotting corpses. In month leading up to the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, suspicious crates and infected roaches found their way into various World of Warcraft cities, giving characters that came into contact with them the scourge toxin, turning them into rampaging, virus-spreading ghouls.

The Scourge forces also expand on the standard reanimation of dead corpses due to there being a number of necromancers deliberately creating more dangerous undead, leading to zombie giants, giant zombie dogs, zombie dragons, and huge constructs made from combining the flesh of women and children.

Death Knights are subversion in that the one's that joined the Lich King willingly aren't dead at all. All the others are powerful warriors that died at the hands of the Scourge and were immediately resurrected as the Lich King's elite troops. Due to this they haven't had time to adequately decay and usually just have paler skin. Also they retain their memories and personality after being resurrected, though they are still bound to the will of the Lich King.

While Lordaeron and Northrend are of course the major victims of this trope, being the Scourge's bases of power, Duskwood in the kingdom of Stormwind is currently dealing with animated skeletons that (probably) have nothing to do with the Scourge. The town of Raven Hill is in ruins, and Darkshire is constantly on watch. Of course, they also have to deal with feral worgen in addition to the undead.

What happened to Quel'thalas counts, only about eleven percent of the original population survived.

As the title character of Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, you get to play a zombie, bringing terror to the Zeerust utopia of Punchbowl.

Possession, which, in addition to being able to lead a variety of zombies (slow, fast, intelligent, mutated, you name it) has the main character as a sentient zombie unleashing chaos on a corporate-controlled city.

There's a mission called "You Only Die Once a Night" where the Hollywood graveyard caretaker Romero(!) asks you to keep hordes of mindless zombies from breaking out of the cemetery. Infuriatingly enough, Romero has only given you the job of watching the graveyard so he can go out and buy porn! Some people neglect any duty they're given, it seems, which is why you're given the option of finding a prostitute for Romero instead of staying behind to cause a zombie apocalypse. Or, if female and with sufficient looks and poise, seducing him instead. The title card hilariously reads "Romero gets some lovin'." Romero specifically states getting bitten doesn't cause zombies, but it sure does hurt like hell.

There's also an earlier mission where you have to track down and kill the members of a cult of vampires that deliberately infects their meals with a horrible virus. You have to fight your way through a horde of zombies before you can take the last one on. The real threat in that quest isn't the cult or the zombies though. It's the CDC, who have the situation firmly in hand and are dangerously close to figuring out that zombies and vampires are the reason for the strange epidemic.

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation has the mutant Pukoids fulfilling this trope. A corrupt starship captain was transporting and dumping tetragenic toxic waste on remote colony worlds, which ended up wiping out several worlds, most of his crew, and eventually kills him (with a little help from Almighty Janitor Roger Wilco).

In the Japanese PS2 game The Zombie vs. Kyuukyuusha (Zombies Vs The Ambulance, and yes that's the real title), you drive around a zombie-infested city in an ambulance, attempting to rescue people and take them back to the hospital that serves as your home base so you can inoculate them against the zombie plague. If you take too long getting people back to base, they turn into zombies and start damaging your ambulance from the inside. And you can upgrade your ambulance so it can take more damage and more easily plow through hordes of zombies.

This game is part of the Simple 2000 series of budget titles, which also features a game called Onechanbara ("Zombie Zone" in the West), in which you play a bikini-wearing samurai girl who goes around slicing up zombies. While the gameplay isn't particularly brilliant, the game is definitely fun. It's proven so popular that sequels have been released on the Wii and Xbox 360, and there's even a movie. As a side note, in Oneechanbara, the Zombie Apocalypse is actually caused by the lead characters — well, they, and some of the villains. They have a "Baneful Blood" curse. If blood touches their skin, it builds power in them — with the downside that this power will eventually drive them insane and kill them. Meanwhile, their blood kills people and turns them into contagious zombies.

Battle for Wesnoth's Walking Corpses, and their level-up, the Soullesses. They follow the Russo rules, for the most part: any unit killed by a Walking Corpse or Soulless becomes a Walking Corpse or Soulless on the side of the Corpse that killed them, simulating The Virus.

Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend features Mad Cow Tourette's zombies (apparently Tourette's syndrome sufferers who ate mad cow-infected meat). They normally shamble slowly, but can sometimes be seen stumbling forwards quickly (catching the player off-guard); they throw chunks of their own flesh to attack; their heads must be completely destroyed to kill them (merely cutting them off will do no good); and (for no other reason than the fact that the world of Postal 2 is already messed up as it is) you can resurrect dead zombies by pissing on them.

A new MMO currently in Beta, Dead Frontier, takes place after a Zombie Apocalypse with the player as one of a handful of survivors who must constantly make supply runs into the city, which has been overrun by zombies of many shapes, sizes and speeds, to procure food, medical supplies, new weapons and ammunition. It's important to note that most everyone has a place in the new society, such as doctors, engineers and even chefs, and those who try to go it alone may find themselves as zombie food more often than they'd like.

The FPS S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl has zombies in one part of the game, who are actually stalkers who have been mind raped by psychic emissions in certain parts of the zone.

One notable difference from conventional zombies is that the brain-burned humans often carry the firearms there were wielding in life. Zombies with machineguns, anyone?

In City of Heroes and City of Villains, zombies are counted among the servants of the Banished Pantheon and the minions of Dr. Vahzilok. Also, the Halloween events feature zombies that spawn from trick-or-treating, and the 2008 incarnation featured zombies crawling from the ground en masse. Finally, the Mastermind Necromancy primary set lets player villains summon their own zombie minions.

A game called The Last Guy features the zombie hero(?) rounding up the various survivors of a zombie apocalypse. From the looks of it, the zombies have devolved (or evolved) into large, dangerous, non-human things, however.

Infected features a massive zombie apocalypse in New York City, played Smash TV style. The player is Officer Stevens, whose blood is not only immune to The Virus, but actively destroys zombies, who are nigh-invulnerable to everything (it's implied they destroyed a tank battalion, and were able to wield weapons) by causing infected blood to explode. This results in the guys in charge of the quarantine to strap a blood gun to one arm of Stevens, give him/her weapons, and run around NYC, splattering zombies. For the record, the game is hilarious and fun, but short.

System Shock 2 had zombies as the first stage of infection by alien parasitic worms, including shambling, strange speech patterns, no vital signs, etc. Oh yeah, and they're still conscious, aware of what they're doing against their will, and apologise while they attack you and beg you to kill them. Later stages were considerably more monstrous, and quite un-zombie like.

The original System Shock had early mutants enemies that acted like normal zombies.

In Elite Beat Agents, one of the missions involves a very lighthearted parody of these in which the zombies are constantly giggling, spread the infection by kissing, and have allergies that cause them to return to being normal people after eating peanuts. Being a Rhythm Game, it's set to a cover of Survivor by Destiny's Child. It's just as wacky as it sounds.

Siren - these are particularly notable, as they retain some of their intelligence and memories of their former life, and although they become murderous and gradually lose the ability to speak language intelligible to humans, they try to re-enact their living life if not over-ruled by the Hive Mind; as the game was first released in Japan in 2003, and EU and US in '04, this actually predates the use of this concept in Land of the Dead, although not the precursors to it seen in Day of the Dead.

The game Overlord I features an area infested with zombies, as a mysterious and agonizing plague turns its victims into the living dead. In a twist keeping with its tone and sense of humor, it's caused by the proximity of a slutty, disease-ridden Succubus Queen; apparently, what's a harmless STD to a demoness is a virulent Zombie Apocalypse-inducing epidemic for humans.

The Virus in [PROTOTYPE] is something like this, only about ten to fifty times worse. For one, unlike most Zombie Apocalypses, it spreads like a highly contagious disease, rather than just happening to already dead people or like something more akin to rabies. Then you get to things like the Hunters and Hydras.

This seemed to be the original concept behind Raving Rabbids, but they decided to go with party games.

In FunOrb's Zombie Dawn game, you play as the Evil Overlordresponsible for the zombie apocalypse. Unlike most zombie apocalypse stories, these zombies are being controlled by someone - you. Also, the government is actually pretty competent. Anyone attacked by a zombie instantly comes back as one.

Plants vs. Zombies, you have to fight off a zombie uprising in your own backyard using nothing but aggressive plants.

In Zombies Ate My Neighbors the zombies are fairly weak (they can be killed with squirt guns), and aren't contagious. However it is possible to temporarily be turned into a zombie by drinking a mystery potion, causing your character to wander around and kill any survivors they touch.

Zombies are a part of the Necromancer's army throughout most of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. They also happen to be slow and weak units (compared to most units of the same tier). You can't even make that many of them. It is however possible to make a looot of skeletons in most of the games. In an average sized map it's not too hard to build an army with over a thousand skeletons, thus creating a skeleton apocalypse.

Metroid: Fusion has a not-quite Zombie Apocalypse in the form of the X-Parasite. Once infected, the victim dies and is consumed, and the X mimics its form and abilities perfectly, eventually asexually dividing into more copies. If killed, it infects the killer or simply regenerates the body. They can even infect corpses to mimic them. One parasite can take over an entire Space Station in seconds. They are truly one of the most dangerous forms of The Virus in existence, beating out even the Flood in apocalypse potential. Easily.

It's taken Up to Eleven in Mass Effect 3 where the Husks of many different species are the primary ground forces of the Reaper invasion, and you have to fight entire hordes of them at a time.

Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned has you trying to clean up one of these with More Dakka. The Jakobs PA system has even been hacked to refer to it as such.

There's something like this in the Mount & Blade mod Solid & Shade, though it isn't an infection. Essentially, the main character is a necromancer and just animates the bodies himself. Though it feels a lot like an infection or apocalypse, since a good way to get corpses is killing them with your zombie army and then reanimating them. It is not uncommon to loose your entire army in a fight, and then get them back with the corpses of your foes. The zombies are semi-intelligent, as they can use weapons, but not sentient. They can be killed by anything that can kill a human, but are much more difficult to kill. They don't appear to require food, although not having food will lower the morale of the party overall (most likely because you still need it) and, due to game mechanics, zombies will abandon you if they have a low morale.

In a bit of irony, the player starts with a corpse in his inventory to start necromancing faster. According to the backstory, this body belongs to the necromancer he killed to get the book of necromancy in the first place.

There's another mod called Chronicles of Talera that features a faction called the Blighted Plague. It's basically a faction of egalitarian Necromancers that brought back the corpses of the dead to overthrow the aristocracy. At first they were good guys, but after discovering tools to capture the souls of their enemies they began a civil war that really doesn't play any role whatsoever in the actual game.

King's Quest IV: The Perils Of Rosella is one of the earliest examples of the trope, which is even more disturbing because it takes place in a fairy tale country of princesses, fairies and magical talking creatures. It is, frankly, terrifying. Fortunately for most young players at the time of it's release, they came late in the game. Due to the general unforgiving hardness of a Roberta Williams title, it was uncommon for any player to get that far without help.

Dead Island is about a zombie apocalypse in a tropical island resort in the South Pacific.

The early 80's Edutainment GameAgent USA is a G-rated Zombie Apocalypse, with people turning into walking balls of TV static and infecting others.

Arma and Arma II both featured popular zombie mods that turned an ultra-realistic tactical FPS into a zombie survival game. The use of massive maps and realistic effects and equipment makes them extremely immersive.

While the text/ASCII-based Hell MOO doesn't feature an actual zombie apocalypse (they go for the standard nuclear warfare), there is a zombie virus and some locations, especially the basement of the Bradbury hotel in Slagtown, are filled with them. Since all NPCs can be killed (with varying degrees of difficulty) and anyone who dies of zombie rot rises as a zombie if their corpse isn't butchered, one or two tough NPCs getting infected can easily result in a zombie plague hitting Slagtown; usually the Freedom City Police is skilled and tough enough to keep the spread outside their borders, but it can make wandering into Slagtown or Gangland suicide for a newbie.

In StarCraft 2, this happens to a group of refugees due to a zerg bioweapon. Raynor's raiders burn out the infested and help the refugees settle in on another planet— where it promptly happens again.

Call of Duty first gave us Nazi Zombies, which was the reason many played World At War. The game mode returned in Call of Duty: Black Ops where it got so bad zombies attack the Pentagon, fourcultmonsterhunters had to be called in and at the end, the Big Bad reveals it's all an Evil Plan to cause an apocalypse. Returned in the sequel with Tranzit, where four people need to decide whether to simply try to kill waves of Zombies that grow in power until they stop (they never do) or try to do the vague things one of two disembodied voices are telling them to do. Call of Duty: Black Ops II certainly fits this trope, as Marlton laments "I would not trade this gun for all the tea in China...if there even is a China anymore."

Dead Space features the necromorphs, these zombies are not just reanimated humans but 'reshaped' necrotic tissue who don't go down until you blow of a limb or three. Head shots are useless against them.

The curse of the Darksign in Dark Souls. Those born with it are marked as Undead and never permanently die, always coming back, losing a bit of their humanity each time. Eventually, they all lose their minds and become Hollows, highly aggressive, near-mindless beings that attack all others. This, plus the habit of throwing the Undead into the Undead Asylum, has destroyed countless nations.

The blood plague in Bloodborne, which leaves those afflicted mindless beasts preying on the healthy.

Spoofed in Disgaea 4 with the A-virus, which is slowly turning all of the Netherworld into mindless zombies - Or rather, they're turning everyone into Axel, but the main characters see little difference.

Rebuild involves a group of survivors building fortifications around a few city blocks and holding off vast zombie hordes. Your goal in the game is to recapture a number of blocks, look for survivors and convince them to join you, produce food and shelter for everyone, keep everyone happy, research technology to help defend against the zombies and cure infections, scavenge for supplies (food, weapons, dogs, binoculars, crowbars, etc.). Once you manage to secure the town, you are given the option of starting over in a new location with 5 people. The third game adds other factions on different maps doing the same. They have different personalities and requirements. You can either make them like you enough to become allies or wage war on them. There are a total of 11 such factions (not counting the nomadic Gustav the Trader), which include the Granville Riffs (gang of karate dudes with mirrored shades inspired by Blacksploitation movies), the Last Judgment Gang (think church plus Hells Angels), Church of the Chosen Ones (a zombie-worshiping cult), the Pig Farmers (whose specialty is long pork), the Government (the remains of the US Government), the Dahlias (former suburban wives seeking to establish a Lady Land), and the Rotten (intelligent zombies, who mostly live in subways and sewers).

Downloadable PC Game Zombie Driver casts the player as an ActionTaxi Driver in the midst of an infested city where the outbreak was caused by a chemical explosion. The cabbie must rescue people trapped in various buildings and return them to an extraction point. He gets paid by the mayor for zombies killed and survivors rescued, so he can buy bigger and badder cars and weapons to run down zombies.

Though all three Diablo games featured undead, only Diablo III features an actual Zombie Apocalypse caused by the Skeleton King of New Tristram after a mysterious meteor crashed into Tristram's cathedral. Whereas in the previous games the zombies were mere mooks that you would meet and kill, this game features them much like a classic example, with them attacking villages and able to turn people they bite into zombies.

In AdventureQuest Worlds, Vordred creates this in the Doomwood Part 1 finale if the hero chooses to betray Artix and let Vordred become the Champion of Darkness.

Also, in Doomwood Part 2, Drakath grants Gravelyn's wish to bring her father back by sending her and everybody else to an alternate past created by him where he never intervened with King Alteon and Sepulchure's duel. There, this is what happens when Sepulchure kills Death.

Even the Yakuza franchise has gotten in on the act — in the game Yakuza: Dead Souls (a.k.a. Yakuza: Of The End), an outbreak of the living dead hits Kamurocho, and Kiryu Kazuma and crew have to take out the problem at its source as only they know how.

Die2Nite is a game set in a world already devastated by one of these. All that is left are a few small towns and buildings in a vast endless wasteland. Unlike many other games of this genre the main goal isn't to survive or find rescue... its to delay death as long as possible. Sooner or later, every town, every player, even the best, will die and have to start over in a new town.

Parodied in LEGO Indiana Jones 2, when you reenter the level in which you escape the nuclear bomb, you find the town to be decimated and smoldering. You then build a device that brings the gray skinned dumbies to life! They can't do anything but irritate you but still...

The Dead Linger wants to provide the ultimate zombie survival experience. In the finished game, it will be completely up to you, whether you want to wander through the almost endless, procedurally generated (and zombie-filled) world alone or with your friends (or strangers) in multiplayer. You'll be able to reinforce a bus and use it as a mobile base or barricade yourself in a prison, barn, military base or other building (or build your own makeshift home). But of course, you'll have to scavenge food and weapons and other things. And also...you are not immune to The Virus.

In the Web Game series Infectonator!, the main goal of the game is to inflict this on cities worldwide. You win once you completely destroy all the cities with your zombie plague.

Averted in Saints Row: The Third when a small section of Steelport is infested with what appear to be zombies. It remains that way for the rest of the game however, so one could argue that the Saints are preventing the Zombie Apocalypse.

In TRON: Evolution and TRON 2.0, virus-infected computers are subject to this, as the corrupted Programs have their circuits turned from normal colors to a Sickly Green Glow, their directives and functions overwritten to the single-minded pursuit of healthy Programs to destroy or corrupt. And in both cases the plague master / Subject Zero was merely an Unwitting Pawn to the truly diabolical Big Bad.

The flash game Organ Trail is an Affectionate Parody of The Oregon Trail where the pioneer journey west in a covered wagon has been swapped out by a station wagon fleeing the undead horde from Washington DC (which has been nuked by the government in an attempt to quell the infection) for safe haven in The Other Rainforest. Along the way, your party will be scrounging food and shooting the horde and you're lucky if you aren't showing up in Oregon with at least three of your five party members already infected.

Several examples in Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Tatooine Republic world quest has a renegade Czerka officer using a Rakata artifact to make armies of "cyber-necrotic" fighters. and then there's the Taris rakghoul plague, which started via a Sithartifact, managed to get off Taris, and then Dr. Lorrik got a hold of it and thought it was a great way to conquer the galaxy and the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement...

WildStar has an extremely bizarre version, where the explosion of an ancient terraformer has mutated the local Squirg (mind-controlling alien squid) population, and the creatures are now raising the dead.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown: Chryssalids turn any human character into a zombie if they manage to kill them, as do the zombies themselves. In Terror missions, there are 18 civilians running around, and the squad members you bring along for the mission aren't safe either. If you don't get the situation under control, your squad will very quickly find themselves knee deep in shambling biting dead. Not to mention the Council mission "Site Recon" in Enemy Within is set in the aftermath of one: a fishing village in Canada gone silent, and XCOM sends a squad to investigate. When you get there, you find the whole place has been overrun by zombies and the Chryssalids that made them. Worse, the Chrysallids are using a whale carcass as a birthing nest.

Minecraft Classic has a couple of mods that involve zombie hordes. "Zombie Survival" is a game mode where one of the players starts out as a zombie, and infects other players by touching them — the zombies' goal is to infect all players before the time limit runs out. (Zombies are represented as humans with an upside-down head, jammed into their body.)

Some custom servers allow the placing of NPC "zombies", which are represented as a green block atop a grey one, and move around chasing after players. Anyone they touch "has his brains eaten" and respawns on his spawn spot. However, they can be killed by destroying their "head block".

Of course like with anything, AliceSoft has touched on this one. Sengoku Rance in the late game features a forbidden youkai named "Soul Binder" who spreads a truely horrifying curse - anything and anyone who touches Soul Binder will turn into an "Infected", a grey-skinned husk with eyes that have a Sickly Green Glow, the victims will rot while aimlessly walking around and their souls are not allowed to leave the body until they are either brutally maimed (Kill It with Fire is basicly the only solution) or the victims touched 5 others each, who then ALSO turn into "Infected". The curse ravaged JAPAN 8 years ago in the story and back then it already caused the most grief in the history of the country. Which is exactly why the Big Bad wants to utilize it.

The setting of Telltale's The Walking Dead, being set in the same universe as the The Walking Dead, but following a different set of characters. In the first season you play as Lee, as he tries to keep himself and a little girl, Clementine, alive.

Tangerine Tycoon allows you to unleash an apocalypse upon the world with the mutant tangerine upgrade. Having at least one of these will cause the sky and grass to turn red, and the human population to decrease, while the mutant tangerine multiplies at an increasingly fast rate. It is possible to fully exterminate the human species with enough time.

Everybody Edits has the zombie potion, which turns the player into a zombie for a minute and spreads the effect to all other players touched. Being a zombie comes with the disadvantage of lower speed, jump height, and having to respawn after the effects end.

In Time Crisis 5, RobertBaxter must have learned something from Caleb Goldman and Albert Wesker. With the drug he had stolen three years prior to the events of the game, he planned on launching a missile loaded with the drug to plunge the entire world into a zombie apocalypse, with the state of New York as his first terrorist attack. The enemies you fight in Stage 5 are also in a zombie-like state.

This situation can be triggered in Nexus Clash by characters who follow Hashaa, Elder Power of Death. Every kill the cultists make rises as a zombie, and zombies raised by more powerful cultists raise other zombies, etc. Fortunately the infection burns out after a few generations, but it only takes a few ambitious players to keep the world infested with the undead more or less permanently. Previous versions of the mechanic didn't have any such limitations, leading to a perpetual self-sustaining Zombie Apocalypse via Gameplay Derailment.

StreetPass Mii Plaza has "Battleground Z" (aka "StreetPass Zombies") as one of its DLC games. It is a Lighter and Softer version of this trope but nonetheless a much darker game than all the others. You have to help Dr. Scarlet to evacuate all the survivors from Hobbiville (who help by giving you weapons based on their favorite hobbies) and find key elements to make a cure.

Cataclysm involves surviving a zombie apocalypse in a randomly generated world. However, there are actually many other invasions and attacks by monsters other than zombies happening at the same time, so you'll have to survive attacks from Big Creepy-Crawlies, Eldritch Abominations, and Triffids on top of the zombies.

The Reckoning is set in the aftermath of one. Details are unclear, but it seems to have been caused by a plague. According to a loading screen, it happened between 2014 and 2019, affected the whole world, and in 2019 the number of survivors in the whole world is 100,000 persons. In the proper game, infected are mostly here to provide early opposition to a low level player character, since most of the action is about the war between the human factions.

The first area you visit and explore, Solomon Island, is a small island community off the coast of Maine that has been overrun by zombies. It turns out that they were created by sea monsters called the Draug, serving as part of their life cycle. They sent an Ominous Fog to blanket the island and cause nearly all of its inhabitants (save for those who were asleep, trapped, or wearing gas masks/respirators) to walk out into the sea and later return to shore as zombies, followed by the Draug themselves, who implant the zombies with eggs in order to turn them into more Draug.

There's also the Filth, which is a zombie apocalypse on a cosmic scale, turning its victims into gibbering loons with black tentacles growing from every orifice who are sentient enough to use weapons and take proactive measures to spread it — and to be fully aware of their horrifying transformation. The stuff also oozes over the landscape, corrupting not just humans, but also plants, animals, and the earth itself. Lore entries and conversations reveal that Filth infection can spread by footprints, or by merely reading arcane graffiti left by a Filth infectee. The fog that overwhelmed Solomon Island was an airborne strain of the Filth, meaning that the zombies you fight there are actually reanimated Filth infectees — and as the Orochi Group's research team finds out, even those townsfolk who are still alive are in the early stages of infection and doomed to turn into monsters. It's behind many of the high-level beasties you face throughout the game, and when you arrive in Tokyo, you get to witness first-hand what a full-blown Filth Apocalypse looks like.

Any Dominions nation with the popkill and autospawn mechanics have elements of this, as the first means population decreases in areas under their influence while the second means armies spawn on their own without you having to recruit them (they are usually coupled for balance reasons). The closest in terms of lore are Middle Age Ermor and the Late Age nation of Lemuria, both undead hordes (one skeletal, the other spectral) with the popkill and autospawn mechanics. It took several desperation moves by surrounding nations to stop and destroy Ermor, including one that made deals with devils and another that raised undead armies of their own.

The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II take place in a world where a fungus called Cordyceps has evolved into a strain that can infest human brains, causing most infected to become violent to the point of insanity. With no way to stop spreading spores, 90% of humanity ends up wiped out over the course of a few years, with only small pockets left in military controlled cities or colonies of independent survivors.

Visual Novels

Discussed and specifically averted in Tsukihime, though in regards to a Vampire Apocalypse instead. Shiki naturally points out that if there are vampires, and they have to feed so much, then why are there still so few? Arcueid points out that A. vampires don't get along well with each other and fight a lot and B. organizations such as The Church hunting them down, so they keep a low profile and avoiding making too many minions to avoid unwanted attention.

Harvest December has a chapter where this effectively happens as the main god of an island infuses pretty much all of the local girls with his power, causing them to go on a primal rampage without any control of their own selves.

Web Animation

The Red vs. Blue Public Service Announcement "Planning to Fail" details the Zombie Apocalypse survival plans of the main characters

Grif: There's two kinds of people in the world Doc. Those who have a plan prepared for when the zombies take over the Earth, and those who don't. We call those last people "dinner".

The Spider Cliff Mysteries: Spider Cliff has the occasional zombie attack, which are all quickly contained offscreen. Except for Annabelle, the intelligent, intact, friendly zombie.

Xombie is a series of animated web shorts, trade paperbacks, and web comics that deals with the war between xombies, zombies, and humans. The schtick is that zombies are your average, run-of-the-mill reanimated dead, whilst xombies are corpses that retain their former intelligence, gain enhanced physical strength, some kind of crazy weapon, and high Animal Empathy. The original shorts revolved around the xombie Dirge and his dog Cerberus protecting a young girl (Zoe), on her way to the last human settlement.

Brawl in the Family's third Halloween episode started with Kirby walking towards Dedede, zombified. Soon, the entire cast was zombified. They all moaned 'braaains...' and began closing in on Mother Brain from the Metroid series. Now there are a bunch of zombies roaming the land, moaning, 'braaaaaiiiinss....' (except Mother Brain, who moaned, 'Meeeee....') The zombies then found a schoolhouse and studied hard and graduated, achieving the 'brains' they wanted. Then, it turns out the characters where just telling scary stories, and Kirby was the last one to add his part to the story. He apparently tells a disgusting and creepy tale, but the comic just skips to when he says, "The End!" with a very cute face while the rest of them look nauseous.

According to the Demononlogy page in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures , one becomes undead only if they die within 24 hours of receiving a scratch or bite from an undead creature. This implies that the wound itself is not automatically fatal, and that if one died more than 24 hours after receiving it they will stay dead.

Dead Metaphor is a comedy set in a world plagued by zombie outbreaks. Zombies are very Romero-like in their actions and their desire to consume flesh — although the human population treats the zombies more as an annoyance than a threat.

Played with in Dead Winter; the city is full of zombies, but they're normally not a threat until a large number is encountered without an escape route. Other humans are far more dangerous.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja's titular Dr. McNinja has faced one, of course. Zombie ninjas, no less. And zombie Ben Franklin. The zombies are contained thanks to McNinja and the mayor of the town (who is secretly a time-traveling survivor of a future ravaged by this very apocalypse) having set up anti-zombie defences for the city. McNinja is convinced the zombies have risen in revenge for him mass-murdering them in the previous storyline (for the greater good, of course). However, it is revealed the zombies are just a side-effect of a resurrection drug used by the clone of Ben Franklin after he was murdered in the previous storyline. The resurrection itself actually turns out to be part of a larger plan by Dracula. It's that kind of comic.

Last Blood with one hand plays along with this trope and with other hand subverts it. While that world, indeed, had experienced Zombie Apocalypse and majority of zombies are near mindless, hungry creatures, the First Zombie was, in fact, a vampire, who starved for too long, and completely retained his intelligence after transformation. This is also true for any other vampire-turned-zombie but not for their zombie "children".

Sluggy Freelance gives a quite elegant and reasonable-looking explanation for why zombies must eat brains (and other organs as well): as dead corpses, zombies are decomposing all the time, but are able to regenerate eaten parts. So if zombies want to keep their intelligence, they simply must eat brains. Or, to put it another way: "To keep our wits about us we need to eat the wits about us."

Additionally, the comic also address the issue as to why zombies do not attack other zombies:

"Humans taste like chicken! Zombies taste like crap!"

Also worth noting that Sluggy has so far had: straightforward ordinary zombies; people turned into socially dysfunctional geek zombies by brain-eating mosquitos; ghouls from another dimension which were treated with similar tropes to zombies but turned out to be of different origins; military research into weaponising zombies; and a zombie-themed restaurant. Not in that order.

The printed version of Van Von Hunter has zombies that crave brains, but are actually intelligent. After they have tasted some really good brownies made by gnomes, they changed their chants from "braiiins" to "brooownies" instead, and raid gnomes for more brownies.

In The Whiteboard, the two weeks to either side of Halloween 2010 featured a zombie uprising that Doc and Roger had to take down. This story arc updated daily, instead of the strip's normal M/W/F schedule.

Zombie Ranch takes place over two decades since the dead began to walk. In this case humanity not only managed to survive the disaster — they have adapted so thoroughly to the reality of the undead that they not only have new laws and customs regarding them, but have managed to turn zombies into a prized consumer commodity.

El Goonish Shive: one short storyline consisted of Sarah, Grace, and Susan discussing Zombie Apocalypse survival strategies. They eventually call Mr. Verres to find out if zombies are a thing in their 'verse; he says that creating undead zombies is very difficult, and even if it does work you'd just end up with "an army of broken machines that will fall apart on its own anyway." Then he admits that not-quite-zombies are much easier to make, what with mind-control, fungal spores, and so on.

In Stand Still, Stay Silent, the zombies are the horribly mutated victims of a sickness that automatically kills most of its victims. The resulting creatures can aggregate into bigger creatures and seem to be of the Perpetual-Motion Monster type. The world had a The Magic Comes Back episode after the initial outbreak, which is one of the hints towards the disease possibly being partly magical in nature.

Web Original

Blogging example: on 13th June 2007, the blogosphere declared a zombie apocalypse. While this page contains the biggest list of links, it is no means exhaustive.

Topps released a card series titled Hollywood Zombies which features parodies of celebrities as flesh-eating zombies.

Zombies are an Iconic feature of Gaia Online. Gaia has not one, but two Zombie Apocalypse events (one traditional, one involving Killer Rabbits), as well as a Vampire war that was functionally identical to a Zombie Invasion. In addition, Gaia has released two item based Zombie themed skins, and later brought back even more zombies for the Olympics (although they're created through a serum rather than The Virus). The Zombies introduced for the Olympics played a part in the 2K8 Halloween event, where they were referred to as Glompies. They killed members of the other three teams by hugging them to death.

The website Last Days Journal is a user-generated series of blogs about what happens after the zombie apocalypse.

4chan's Weapons-oriented component routinely sees threads of what would you do during a Zombie Apocalypse. Anything from where would you go, to what weapons and ammo and supplies you carry is brought up. The board is getting fairly sick of it at this point.

SCP Foundation: Several SCP objects can potentially trigger this, especially SCP-008, which specifically invokes the trope. Additionally, SCP-093 allows access to a world where something like this has already happened; though the "zombies" are faceless, legless horrors, produced by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, that have absorbed so many people that by this point they're the size of buildings.

ZOOOOOmmxBIES is a german Play-by-Post game, which follows the events of the apocalypse - directly after it hits and several years after that.

Not Always Right's sister site Not Always Romantic features several stories involving people asking their significant other what they'd do if they were turned into a zombie. They're all titled "Till Undeath Do Us Part, Part X." The other Not Always sites posted stories taking place during a zombie apocalypse for April Fool's Day 2015.

In "10 DEAD PEOPLE WHO CAME BACK TO LIFE!" by Matthew Santoro, Matthew says that when people hear about people coming back from the dead, they picture a group of zombies rising up and people running from them in horror.

The service terms for Amazon's free game engine Lumberyard include a paragraph which notes that the engine is "not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat", but with one exception:

However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

The Cartographers Handbook deals with an alternative Earth that was struck with a zombie apocalypse shortly after the American Civil War.

The Princess Thieves takes place on the same Earth, dealing with what has happened to Victorian Britain.

Red Panda Adventures supervillain Professor Zombie tended to avoid causing these, preferring to use the zombies she created as mooks she can control. She even assists in fighting an Apocalypse in season seven. However, when driven by revenge in season nine, this goes out the window as by that point all she wants is to cause as much carnage as possible and she makes at least two separate attempts to create a zombie disaster before she's stopped.

The third "Treehouse of Horror" episode has a segment involving Bart getting a book from the "Occult Section" of the school library and attempting to reanimate deceased family cat Snowball I with it; he accidentally reanimates the human graveyard instead.

In a "Treehouse of Horror XX" segment, a tainted Krusty burger causes a 28 Days Later-style outbreak, which leads to the Simpsons barricading themselves inside their house, where they learn that Bart is immune. The zombie hordes burst in, the family escapes, Homer gets bitten but it's hardly much difference, and Bart gets to cure the masses by bathing in their soup.

On the Halloween episode "Nightmare on Wilson Way" in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, when Bloo accidently gives Mr. Herriman a heart attack, he buries the body but Herriman's zombie returns. Eventually, the entire household is turned into zombies. It then turns put to be a huge prank played on Bloo to get back at him for his Halloween tricks.

Mighty Max had an episode where Max had to travel to Haiti to help his mother investigate the strange behavior of the locals. They had a Zombie Gait and were pretty strong, however they were possessed by slug-like symbiotes (you could kill the slug to free the victim) and tried to attach more slugs to make more "zombies". Eventually Max finds a hive full of them and kills the Queen slug. The victims were fully aware of what they were doing, a unique trait for these zombies.

In the Ben 10: Omniverse episode "Something Zombozo Comes That Way", Zombozo creates a special virus called the Airborn Clown Virus and injects into pairs of fake clown teeth. Using The Virus, he manages transform everyone in Bellwood (except Ben) into his army of Zombie Clowns that can only say "Come One, Come All".

There is an episode of The Smurfs called "The Purple Smurfs" in which Lazy gets bitten by a "purple fly". This turns him purple, makes him aggressive and causes him to bite other Smurfs. The same thing then happens to those Smurfs. As noted above, this is an adaptation of a storyline from the original Smurf comic book.

6teen had a one-hour special in which zombies raid the mall setting of the series, and the main characters try to avoid being bitten. Of course in the end it's all revealed to be a dream had by Judd from watching too many zombie movies.

The Batman had a zombie apocalypse in the episode "Strange New World", courtesy of a toxin created by Professor Hugo Strange. It was eventually revealed that the apocalypse was just an illusion Strange created to trick Batman into releasing the real toxin into Gotham, which Batman figures out at the last moment.

Invader Zim: Subverted when the zombies unleashed by mall cop Slab Rankle in FBI Warning of Doom prove to be just as stupid as almost everyone else in the show.

Zim: Nothing stops Zim. Nothing! Not even this filthy army of zombies!

A bad case of pink eye was going around. Due to some Worcestershire sauce being used to embalm Kenny, he comes back as a zombie and starts infecting people. The local doctor, when visited by some of the infected, mistakes the condition for pink eye and prescribes some topical cream. Stan, Kyle and Cartman, with the help of Chef (who does a great Thriller bit) attempt to stop the zombie threat.

In a season 3 episode the Decepticons are tricked by the Quintessons into releasing a powerful creature called the Dweller. The Dweller drains the energy of any transformer it can capture, turning them into an "energy vampire". Despite this title, they behave almost exactly like zombies - they move slowly, though not quite shambling, and drain the energy from others to make more energy vampires. They even lose all color, becoming gray and lifeless in appearance.

In Transformers Prime the first five episodes concerned the use of Dark Energon, which revived Transformers into a mindless, zombie-like state. They don't spread the virus around, and Dark Energon only affects dead cybertronians, but given that is is AFTER a galactic war, corpses are not exactly in short supply, especially not back home...

The two-part season 3 finale "The Return of Optimus Prime", has everyone affected by the Hate Plague that has spread throughout the galaxy. Optimus used the collected wisdom of the Matrix of Leadership to wipe out the plague.

The episode "Zombie Pickle" in Jimmy Two-Shoes has everyone in Miseryville turn into pickle zombies. It turns out to be a nightmare that Jimmy had

Superfriends had one of the series' scariest stories with "Day of The Plant Creatures" when a meteorite crashes into a swamp and cause a flood of plant creatures who rampage and infect every animal into one of them while the Super Friends race to find a way to stop the disaster.

Adventure Time episode's title "From Bad to Worse" has one, accidentally caused by Princess Bubblegum and is transmitted whenever a victim of zombifcation bites someone. The episode sees a Dwindling Party as the heroes turn to zombies one by one before the day is saved.

The "Going Dutch" episode of Motorcity, although the zombies aren't actually dead people, they're just infected by Nanomachines put out by Kane.

The first (intended) episode of Moral Orel is about this: Orel learns "not to reject Jesus' gift of life" so he believes all the dead people in Moralton are sinning. He uses a necronomicon book to bring back his best friend's dead grandpa (and strip him because he thinks his clothes smell) and within minutes, there's a zombie apocalypse. It turns out most of the adults in Moralton have Skewed Priorities: They're upset that the corpses are naked rather than on a rampage.

A G-Rated version occurs in the Grojband episode, "Dance of the Dead", as lightning striking the haunted amp, combined with Corey's terrible lyrics causes this.

Gloriously subverted in Corpse Bride when the dead come to the land of the living for Victor and Emily's wedding. While people are freaked out at first, some eventually realized their lost loved ones are among the crowd.

In the Phineas and Ferb special "Night of the Living Pharmacists", Dr. Doofenshmirtz turns his brother/rival Roger into a clone of himself. Thanks to the excess energy used by Doof's invention of the week the transformation starts to spread, and soon Danville is crawling with mindlessly-duplicating "Doofenzombies".

In the Gravity Falls episode "Scary-oke", Dipper tries to convince a pair of government agents that there's something weird about the town by showing them Journal 3. When they aren't moved, Dipper randomly recites one of the magic spells enclosed and ends causing zombies to burst from the ground! Luckily, it turns out the undead can be destroyed with three-point harmony, requiring the Pines family to sing.

In "Brainzburgerz", the heroes find themselves in a dimension that's just been hit by a zombie infestation. They later discover that these particular zombies are alive but have been infected by tainted food from a corrupt corporation disguising itself as a fast food chain, and that their mission is to to find and deliver a suitcase containing a cure to a secure military facility.

In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "The Clowning", there's a Time Skip to 67 years later where the Aqua Teens' house is being attacked by zombies who are being kept at bay by a laser turret defense system that they installed at some point.

Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot: One episode, when a Love Potion goes wrong, turning the other Care Bears into creepy "love zombies" bent on apparently hugging Oopsy to death.

The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "28 Pranks Later" deals with Rainbow Dash accidentally starting an outbreak of zombie-like cookie addiction by feeding everyone in Ponyville joke cookies with rainbow filling, giving them "rainbow mouths" in obvious place of blood. It all turns out to be a prank the whole town pulled on Rainbow Dash when they got sick of her wanton pranking.

Some smart-ass hacker in Austin, Texas broke into the controls of two electronic road signs in January of 2009, replacing their usual notices about upcoming construction with warnings of, among other things, "Zombies ahead!". Drivers were amused; city safety officials were not.

Zombie Squad is a disaster-preparedness group that uses the metaphor of a Zombie Apocalypse to encourage people to prepare for real-life emergencies, on the principle that if one is prepared for the dead to rise from their graves en masse to feed on the living, and the collapse of civil order that would inevitably ensue, that dealing with something as prosaic as an earthquake or hurricane is small potatoes.

"Zombie Apocalypse" is a common brainstorming scenario for first responders because it's widespread enough to implicate all of the major disaster relief agencies, but also fictional so it doesn't flare up the usual interservice rivalries. It's also easier to get civilians to play along, or at least not panic or send confused messages, if the scenario is clearly fictional.

ZombieFit is a parkour/fitness class designed to prepare participants for the ever-present threat of a zombie apocalypse.

Most nerds/geeks/etc. have put some amount of thought into the subject. Pretty much all of them have plans.

While nearly every (pick your term) has put some amount of thought into it, there is now an entire nerd subculture dedicated to zombies in the same way trekkies are primarily dedicated to Star Trek, with the amount of thought put into their discussions making the Zombie Survival Guide look like Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Foreign Policy magazine had a feature article on how different schools of International Relations theorists would approach the Zombie problem.

The author of the article, Dan Drezner of the Fletcher School for Diplomacy (aka the best foreign affairs school in America), has published a monograph called Theories of International Relations and Zombies. It covers the major paradigms of IR theory and the "corpus" of zombie literature and film. It's an excellent introductory text to IR theory for beginners, and the results show that while a zombie apocalypse would suck, it's unlikely to be the end of humanity. It's also really damned funny.

This article debunks the lethality of a zombie apocalypse, showing how it would never get very far. A notable example is pointing out how rabies doesn't exactly sweep through the world, so why would zombie infections?

Other organizations have done the same as the spread of a zombie apocalypse apparently models highly infectious epidemics pretty well.

It's possible that zombie tropes may be partially rooted in events during The Black Death or similar plagues. Mass graves were used at times, and high fevers can cause delirium or even brain damage. So if someone was buried haphazardly but recovered from the plague enough to free themselves, witnesses would see an inarticulate, clumsy person covered with sores leaving a graveyard, which would look a lot like a "zombie" even when the trope was unbuilt.

There may have even been plague victims supposedly "attacking" random people, uninfected or not, though this is all likely due to severe hallucinations and clumsy walking. And of course, no plague infected people would actually eat people they came in contact with.

There is also a group called the Zombie Research society dedicated to fact gathering (as such) about zombies.

Zombie Tools is a small company in Missoula, Montana that forges a variety of knives, swords, machetes and other nasty bladed things out of 5160 spring steel and other quality materials. They're designed specifically to cleave through flesh and bone, and therefore zombies.

On February 11, 2013, the Emergency Alert System on several TV stations (particularly in Montana and Upper Michigan) broadcast a warning that the dead were rising from their graves. Ultimately, this was blamed on hackers and the stations' still using the default passwords on their EAS equipment.

Two days later, a radio station in La Crosse, Wisconsin managed to accidentally trigger the EAS on another TV station in their area by playing the exact same clip during their morning show.

Some sufferers of OCD have obsessions with end-of-the-world scenarios and compulsive listmaking, using many hours of their time thinking of how to prepare and writing it down, only to never acquire the needed supplies or practice the necessary skills. Obviously, zombie scenarios are the root of some sufferer's obsessions, and they may even be triggered into compulsions by seeing zombies in fiction.

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